A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A male usually had made up his mind before you began to talk to him -so why bother?- but a female, because her mind was more supple, was always prepared to become more disappointed in you than she had yet suspected possible.”
“A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.”
Source: The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“A malicious enemy is better than a clumsy friend.”
“A Malignant State by Stewart Stafford
When oozing eyes of paranoia,
And the septic ears of hearsay,
Vomit hysteria up as atrocity,
The mad dog jackal has its day.
A demented warden's open prison,
Each dwelling house, a divided cell,
Community focus now second best,
Our loved ones, cats in the wishing well.
For your "security," a police state, gifted,
Humiliation's fires rage by a dry water spout,
A lawfare circus for their spoiler alerts,
Truth's spectral vessel a flood of doubt.
© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
“A Mall and Bullet Holes"
While walking in the city of Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a country devastated and drained
by the wars of the global elite,
exactly like mine,
I arrived at an intersection and noticed a huge mall on the right side…
On the left side, there was
an old residential building filled with bullet holes
that looked like eyewitnesses
to all the free death that took place here
in a war that has since ended,
yet its real causes and the criminals behind it
are still lurking in every corner,
like infected pus ready to burst
at any moment of awareness…
I wondered bitterly:
When will the world understand
that violence never erupts inadvertently,
that all violence in our times is premeditated and agreed upon
by a small elite that decides in advance
that any nation that rejects malls, consumption, and superficiality,
must be disciplined with free death for those who resist!
It is also agreed upon – and it all costs – that
the minds and souls of all survivors
must permanently be pierced with bullet holes!
In the same intersection, I observed a redhaired elderly woman
with sorrowful eyes deep as bullet holes…
I then saw a group of youth wearing modern clothes,
like those we see in malls…
The elderly woman looked at them as if
wishing to tell them about all that happened here,
but they didn’t notice her existence
for their eyes were fixated on their phones…
I painfully wondered then:
Has anyone told them about what happened here?
Can they distinguish the sounds of bombs from those of fireworks?
Has this elderly woman, who looked broken and brokenhearted,
told them about the real price she’d paid
with all the holes left in her heart and her history
for the sake of these malls and cheap consumer goods?
[Original poem published in Arabic on July 4, 2024 at ahewar.org]”
“A malnourished animal who is afraid to look for food beyond its territory will surely die without suffering death by consuming what it can find nearby instead of overcoming its fear and looking beyond its self-placed boundaries for a food supply that is better at keeping it alive. How, then, it this any different than humans who limit their territory to find a partner because of the fear of distance, yet, complain that they are alone and unable to find anyone who is good for them?”
“A man . . . must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow.”
Source: Emma
“A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink.”
Source: The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays
“A man.
A really manly man with a lot of mannishness in his manliness.”
Source: Storm and Silence
“A man able to think isn't defeated - even when he is defeated.”
“A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.”
Source: A Tramp Abroad: Mark Twain's Collections
“A man achieves his purpose when he learns that giving is the ultimate goal of life.”
“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
Source: Essays: Moral, Political and Literary
“A man act according to his thoughts.”
“A man actually has two Gods. The one, created him and the other, he created. Nature is not the first God but the first God exists in and as a part of the nature; a man with the help his reason creates a God against the forces of nature that are perceived to be as threat, hence the second God. The second God is the property of an individual mind that created it. A child has no reason and hence it has no second God; but it has the first God not yet known to it because the fear is not felt by the child! The first God is felt and known due to the fear ingrained in the instinct and the second God is the surrender and prayer brought out by the reason!”
“A man admires a woman not for what she says, but what she listens to.”
Source: The World of George Jean Nathan: Essays, Reviews, & Commentary
“A man advanced in years that thinks fit to look back on his former life, and calls that only life which was passed with satisfaction and enjoyment, excluding all parts which were not pleasant to him, will find himself very young, if not in infancy.”
Source: The spectator
“A man afraid of death will never play the part of a live man.”
“A man after death, is not a natural but a spiritual man; nevertheless he still appears in all respects like himself.”
Source: Conjugial Love and Its Chaste Delights: Also, Adulterous Love and Its Sinful Pleasures
“A man after God's own heart is...
a man who yearns to please God,
a man who desires to grow spiritually,
a man who had a heart that obeys.”
Source: A Young Man After God's Own Heart: A Teen's Guide to a Life of Extreme Adventure
“A man agrees with god as a raindrop agrees with the storm”
“A man ain't got no right to be a public man, unless he meets the public views.”
Source: The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit
“A man ain't nothing but a man. But a son? Well, now, that's somebody.”
“A man always assumes that others are as virtuous as himself”
Source: Seventh Son and Red Prophet
“A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.”
Source: Mencken Chrestomathy
“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.”
Source: Sherlock Holmes Complete Collection With illustrated Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 4 Novels, 56 Short Stories and 120+ illustrations
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”
“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. Let us be like the man of the frontier and always reveal with utmost honesty our real reasons for all that we do.”
“A man always has two reasons for what he does--a good one, and the real one.”
“A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.”
Source: Emma: A Novel. In Three Volumes
“A man always looks good in a dark suit.”
“A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.”
Source: Mencken Chrestomathy
“A man always writes absolutely well whenever he writes in his own manner, but the wigmaker who tries to write like Gellert ... writes badly.”
“A man and a woman are new to one another throughout a life-time, in the rhythm of marriage that matches the rhythm of the year. Sex is the balance of male and female in the universe, the attraction, the repulsion, the transit of neutrality, the new attraction, the repulsion, always different, always new.”
Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'
“A man and a woman marry because both of them do not know what to do with themselves.”
“A man and a woman represent two heavenly beings.”
Source: Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind
“A man and a woman wanting each other is by far one of the least sinful things I've seen”
Source: Priest
“A man and his dog goes so well with home and castle.”
Source: One man and his dogs
“A man and his dog is a sacred relationship. What nature hath put together let no woman put asunder.”
“A man and his tools make a man and his trade.”
“A man and his wife, each in a different small plane, were out enjoying a flight, when the husband committed a flight error. He was able to recover, but his wife who was following him, crashed and was killed. The husband was distraught, blaming himself for the accident. One day when pleading with the Lord for forgiveness, he heard a voice saying "Jesus died, even for dumb mistakes."”
“A man and his work, that is all, there is.”
“A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.”
Source: Collected Stories
“A man appears most uncaring when he is afraid.”
Source: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
“A man approaching retirement called the retirement office to inquire about his pension. Afterward, he was asked if his wife worked. “She’s worked all her life making me happy”, he replied. “Yes sir, but has she earned money to receive her pension?” “When we got married we agreed on an arrangement”, he said. “I would earn the living, and she would make the living worthwhile”.
“Make the living worthwhile”…have we forgotten the very essence of that? Have we forgotten to live for someone else, that doing so IS what makes a living worthwhile?”
“A man armed with a rhyming dictionary is a dangerous man.”
“A man arrives in a car, and with his hands, grabs the lions and kicks and punches them, and they turn into butterflies flying in the air. ... The man was silent, unable to speak. Eating the butterflies from the animals he fought.”
Source: Tomiétrèla
“A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be.”
Source: The Will to Power
“A man asked for an early meal.
His wife said: “It is for supper.”
Source: Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms
“A man asked Muhammad what was the mark whereby he might know the reality of his faith. Muhammad said, 'If thou derive pleasure from the good which thou hast performed and thou be grieved for the evil which thou hast committed, thou art a true believer.' The man said. 'In what doth a fault really consist' Muhammad said, 'when action pricketh thy conscience, forsake it.'”