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Manhood Quotes

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Manhood Quotes

“In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us: 'A perfect woman, nobly planned, To warn, to comfort, and command, And yet a spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light.”

“Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.”

“I believe a man’s finest hour often comes when he is at his weakest. When he is broken, affronted and at a place of great emotional transparency. It’s there he has the rare insight of an inescapable truth…he’s merely a man. As his bravado washes away into a puddle of reflective tears, it reveals that he is merely flesh, blood and bones and amounts to very little without the love and guidance of our creator. It’s only then, that I believe, a man begins to truly find his way.”

“A man needs to feel powerful and respected. Innately within us, as far back as we can remember, we have taught ourselves to grand stand in our abilities to be tough, to conquer, to impress and to win in all aspects of our lives in order to be validated by others and in doing so we have built our conceptual house of self on the sand of societal opinion. Yet, ironically, it’s only when a man finds his true strength in humility, in its purest sense, will he ever experience what genuine power and respect feels like. The man who builds his conceptual house of self on the rock of unpretentious decorum simply needs no validation outside of his creator. He is who he is…and for all intense and purposes that is the only respectable power any man should ever seek.”

“He began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. In the Creation of Ea, which is the oldest song, it is said, 'Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky.”

“Many of those who elected to remain might have escaped. 'Chivalry' is a mild appellation for their conduct. Some of the vaunted knights of old were desperate cowards by comparison. A fight in the open field, or jousting in the tournament, did not call out the manhood in a man as did the waiting till the great ship took the final plunge, in the knowledge that the seas round about were covered with loving and yearning witnesses whose own salvation was not assured.”

“You can’t expect to achieve a dream if you don’t push yourself harder. Whether it’s strength training, or a sales goal at work, or anything. You’ve got to push through past what you think you can do. And when you do it, it builds confidence in you, and your next task will have a momentum to it. The confidence gained makes your output exponential. You have already done something you thought was impossible. Now you are waiting for the next impossible task.”

“Sometimes, we fail at a challenge. That can be a disappointment, but it can also be the thing that helps us learn how to rise above and meet that challenge on the next go round. Failure can build discipline and strength and wisdom. It’s up to us if we choose to let that failure rip our confidence away. We get to choose to keep pressing in and charging forward to meet the challenge.”

“rotted down from manhood by their hopeless misery on the isle; wonted to cringe in all things to their lord, himself the worst of slaves; these wretches were now become wholly corrupted to his hands. He used them as creatures of an interior race; in short, he gaffles his four animals, and makes murderers of them; out of cowards fitly manufacturing bravoes.”

“He had suddenly the clearest understanding he had ever had of the way his father had gone so wrong. A man's strength was supposed to be against the outside world; to fight it back from himself and from those he took under his protection: his wife, his children, and for a man strong enough, more people still, people like his employees. To turn it inward, against the very people you had been given the strength to protect, because you couldn't deal with the outward fight, was the ultimate weakness.”

“Consent & Manhood (The Sonnet) Better deemed a coward than forward, For there is too much at stake. Stand ready to wait till infinity, Without violating her personal space. She's not your bonerville, Until she gives you consent. Remember, consent is the line, Between a baboon and a sapiens. Expose your feeling with your gestures, Earn her trust without forcing yourself. Keep your libido down, below your knee, Till you are asked to strip all restraint. It is no man that turns a beast at the sight of woman. Real Man is a father, friend and lover - all in one.”

“With his pendulous penis swinging from side to side, the beast clip-clopped up a rickety flight of stairs led by Pablo Zapata's wife, who took him through a beaded curtain into a room where a bevy of sullen women reclined on tatty sofas. A collective gasp rang out among the group and many crossed themselves in silent prayer.”

“The old refrain is that there are no atheists in foxholes. That's nonsense. They are there by the millions. There is little in combat that will lead one to look upon the Creator with favor. What can't be there, instead, is the individualist, the selfish, the self-consumed, the self-centered, the aloof loner. Such a man cannot long survive. The terror of combat cannot be described by fear of death. There are worse things. The world can suddenly become a very cold place...He needs warmth, a fire, to survive: His discipline, his training, his duty, honor and country, his family, and ultimately the very oak of his manhood are thrown into the blaze, but they are not enough to save him. At the end, he needs the warmth of his comrades. Otherwise, all he will have with which to face the cold dark will be his own spent soul.”

“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun.”

“Aside from this notion of fecundity, there are other aspects that need discussion here. Most striking is a powerful belief that masculinity is an artificially induced status, that it is achievable only through testing and careful instruction. Real men do not simply emerge naturally over time like butterflies from boyish cocoons; they must be assiduously coaxed from their juvenescent shells, shaped and nurtured, counseled and prodded into manhood.”