Masculinity Quotes

“In my native Denmark, literature seems to be a kind of all people’s Church - or its substitute. We all treat our Danish literature like a church. This is our true form of state religion, our contribution to the world’s variety, diversity and cultural wealth, our vivid and palpable contribution to the entire treasury box of the world and mankind. That's what the Danish literature is. For some of our more down-to-earth neighbours, the literature and literary exercises are merely means of communication, relaxation, amusement, but certainly, nothing that might be considered sacred. Not for us, the Danes. We didn’t happen to write “Hamlet”, but we all the more so revere Karen Blixen, Nikolai Grundtvig, Georg Brandes, Tove Ditlevsen. No wonder: the Vikings whom we also revere as our founding forefathers, were the first Danish writers. The first Danish writings are the Viking inscriptions in the Runic alphabet on raised stones – called “runestones” - that are still quite visible in the Danish landscape.”
― Della Swanholm

“Four Mighty Ones are in every Man: a perfect Unity Cannot exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden, The Universal Man, to Whom be glory evermore Amen.”
― William Blake

“There is no alpha male and beta male,
There is only man and baboon.
Decency defines a man's character,
Not the virility of his heirloom.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Visvavictor: Kanima Akiyor Kainat

“Your fear is not only hurting me, it’s hurting you… Consider how often you have dismissed your own appearance, behaviors, emotions and aspirations for being too feminine or masculine. What might your life be if you didn’t impose these designations on yourself, let alone on me?”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.

“In a way, it didn't. They didn't start the fight. I did. That's the part only my therapist knows.
I didn't mind that they spat at me and shoved into me as I walked across the football field on my way home. I'd learned to ignore that. I snapped and started the fight because they said something awful about Ever.
Irrational gallantry, maybe? I never asked for this type of masculinity, but there it was.”
― Marieke Nijkamp, Even If We Break

“Many a time I was desperately tired; but all the same it was a tremendous pleasure to sit there working and earning money. It was like being a man.”
― Henrik Ibsen

“Most men are like children, or rather the teenagers -- they don’t trust the women who are cordial and interesting and funny and easygoing, they are rather in for the insurmountable obstacles of some women, and there they find their happiness and their twisted reward.”
― Della Swanholm

“I think that the old-young polarization and the male-female polarization are perhaps the two leading stereotypes that imprison people. The values associated with youth and with masculinity are considered to be the human norms, and anything else is taken to be at least less worthwhile or inferior.”
― Susan Sontag

“A part of him did not want to disrupt her—she was so with herself that stopping her rhythm would be like interrupting a play or telling a healthy sea animal to stop swimming. But greater than the need to admire was his need to follow that admiration—which meant talking to the stranger.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“War is a masculine merchandise.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“His dad had told him many times that the definition of a real ma is one who cries without shame, reads poetry with his heart, feels opera in his soul, and does what's necessary to defend a woman”
― Delia Owens, Where The Crawdads Sing

“There’s a direct association between machismo and the refusal to recognize and respond appropriately to the climate catastrophe. It’s a result of versions of masculinity in which selfishness and indifference – individualism taken to its extremes – are defining characteristics, and therefore caring and acting for the collective good is their antithesis.”
― Rebecca Solnit

“On weekdays, everyone would read Armistead Maupan's "Tales of the City," published as a novel in 1978. His leading character Michael "Mouse" Toliver, a clone-ish softie himself, laments the experience of meeting men– nice mustache, Levis, a starched khaki army shirt, strong– and trying to resist visiting the bathrooms, lest he encounter the giveaway, the fantasy-killer: face creams and shampoos for days." Mouse was only being wistful, but the underlying efemmophobia was pernicious on the scene. Masculinity can be something that gay men project onto one another, only to snatch it away at the first sign of inauthenticity. That they hadn't rolled out of bed looking ruggedly handsome, but required a beauty routine to get that way.”
― Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out

“Every gentleman is alpha male,
whereas most alpha males are just jerks.
Focus on being gentle, being humble,
instead of obsessing over a prehistoric construct.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown

“[Fashionable Beard]
I asked a friend growing a fashionable beard playfully: “Has your beard increased your fans?”
“You have no idea how much it has!” He responded.
“Do you wonder why people can’t see you clearly without it?” I asked.
“This beard reminds me every day that people simply refuse to see things as they are – bare and naked. They will notice and see things covered with any cover, except not as they are!” he added with a laughter.

[Original poem published in Arabic on January 16, 2023 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako

“For many years, video games gave him a person and a place to be, as well as things to do. But an event happens to a pair of eyes after enough hours before a computer screen—they will scan the display and mid-game, shatter. Consoles crack men. It’s massacre. Andrei would thumb plastic so often that his mind would flee reality, as well as the virtual world he was in, and enter a dimension of empty euphoria. But one euphoric day he felt games were a sophisticated way to keep a pig in its own corner. The videogames advanced to become more realistic—but one must not be fooled by decorations. The detail-rich galaxies he found himself investing his life in were in fact the same galaxy as Pacman or Tetris: 1s and 0s.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Pornography did not serve him either. Andrei used to have his personal kinks and fetishes, but after a while, nothing could get him off. For a long time, the only videos he would search were the ones titled: “Who is she?” The only thing that vitalized his self-play was the prospect of some woman on the earth no one knew of and could not find. There was something infinite to these tapes, not the appearance of the girls, but the agitating dissatisfaction and momentary access of a not-so-innocent stranger who men innocently lost forever. It consisted of poorly recorded videos, posted from a smartphone or webcam, and a desperate number of melancholy comments trying to search for the mystery woman. There were plenty of these recordings. But it broke Andrei even more when eventually he knew all the girls no one knew.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“The thing about guys his age, Andrei thought, was they all morphed into one big “bro.” Certain phrases like, “Nah, you’re good... damn, wow, that’s sick... I appreciate you,” have taken such enormous space in the air. Young men use them habitually, and accompany it with that general, polite airiness in the voice that communicates there is no incoming trouble. But that nice tone took a shape on vocal cords, and those phrases redesigned the brain all into one puzzle piece: the modern man. It was like taking a pair of scissors and cutting a man’s unique shape into a rectangle, so all men could be properly put back into place, like gathering playing cards to be shuffled.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Throughout the years, the ugly boy had lost belief in the practicality of love. He argued there would always be a better version of a man somewhere in the world and thus, no sound reason for a woman to commit to one. Plus, he believed, there was nothing to a woman—they did not love. They chose men for certain seasons and focused to enjoy life above all, in all its grandeur, intentionally saving sincerity for the end—once they were finished. How can men with eyes not sink into depression? And if a woman ever welcomed a man as a companion, she always smelled his feelings, which were gratifying and advantageous to her, and rosily sipped a man’s glad spring of generosity until she was satiated. Andrei saw a woman’s timeline and in response, froze his heart dry and hammered it to pieces. Steel or emptiness—these were the only two available armors available and adequate to withstand the ephemeral nature of women, who he regarded not as individual people, but as a collective entity of superficial vampires. So he promised himself he’d never woo the dead.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“He eyed her fingernails, painted bright blue. Her wrists smelled like peppermint and she said her name was “Stella.” Andrei was impressed by her femininity, the subject of which was a dangerous thing. When some men are exposed to a certain kind of woman, they become so absolutely entranced by their iridescence that they would do anything to be around them for longer. Lie. Linger. Kill. It was a pure, wild attraction, that started from a collarbone, that would make a man agree to rip out his tooth if only to hear a woman talk again. Lastly, she had these devilish eyes exclusive to brown and only ever sometimes encountered. Those types of eyes were so dark they had death in them, but were framed with such sweet, narrow eyelids that took death, swirled it in a sizzling adorableness, and communicated a dangerous, impatient capability for sex. It seduced men throughout history—what lived behind the mischievous, delicate, hickory fire.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Beautiful people were led to think their beauty needed to go somewhere. On a person’s phone. In a magazine. Outwards. Why do anything with it? Maybe all the models on runways loved it, but maybe most just walked in because they fit inside the doors. Here was a pretty man who did not share himself and very much could have. It was rare to meet someone with that kind of jaw, sweet eyes, and those arms, who did not fall into modeling or influencing. There was magic in this. Lorenzo inadvertently alchemized his reserve into a valuable currency: the only time someone could see his beauty was if they were in the same room he was in or if they heard about it from someone who was there. Lorenzo had planted a kind of beauty in the world not captured by a camera, but a beauty that passed through and could only ever be run into.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“A man shined to her left. He was called Lorenzo and he drank a hot chocolate with whole milk. He sipped it with fleshy, pink lips and
60
k.f.
gulped it down his large neck that seemed to be a kind of engine. The gulp went down his chest, where his muscles cooled after his calisthenics, and sunk somewhere behind the walls of his tight, tan stomach. He was a chess set of a man. He had burly knights as biceps, thick bishops as legs, healthy pawns as his troop of fingers, and the battlement of rooks as his fortified abs of stone.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Life was never about survival. For a long time, it was proposed that all living organisms shared a single purpose: to survive—but this was not the appropriate case for humans. Survival was all along but a secondary basis to man, while attendance to life was the first. One must secure something to survive for, as the cells of the straightforward body will, regardless of permission, do their job. Men do not breathe without air first around to inhale. A sailor cannot know his passion for sailing without an existing body of water. Similarly, a man can only survive if there is something larger in him that lives—not a beating heart, but a moving one. If he only “holds on,” prolonging preservation and supervising health, there is nothing in that lingering lifeform to endanger or threaten. And since no system of security can defend from death’s next play, there is no use in mortals wearing armor. The essence of chance had loitered since the beginning of time, anticipating a being who adhered to its expressions. The human priority is one’s comet.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Andrei perched on the rooftop of the cinema and looked out at Westwood’s nightlife bustling before him. He was mounted on the single, cream, stoned gargoyle built above in the corner of the theatre. He and his gothic animal breathed under the cold moon. Yes. He always felt like the moon—generally unnoticed by the world, that never minds—and navigated richly through his life alone and uninterrupted, like a ghost. Truth is an unobvious color. Those who attempt truth will never make billboards or conversations but usually sift in the background in awkward veritas.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“The method man has used to domesticate women and animals should be studied, improved, and taught to our upcoming men. We cannot have a society that its men either fear women or they are becoming them.”
― DON SANTO

“They didn’t fuck anymore. He cared about her too much. You have to want to hurt somebody to fuck them. They tried a few times and he would look in her eyes and it would make him laugh.”
― Delicious Tacos, The Pussy

“We are seated across from a couple of pregnant women and their partners, who glance at us over their magazines. I can imagine that we make a strange pair, but it's the way they glare at me that makes me pause, as though I'm rude for appearing this way, with my square jaw and unreadable face, in a space where they had expected someone legible.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one's voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs—I have been taught all my life that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of this abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“Na koi Pitaaji na koi Bhai. Aadmi ko Apne per khada hona hota hei.

No Father and No Bother. Every Man has to stand up on his own feet.”
― Avijeet Das

“I am soothed by your quiet demeanor, the absence of the masculine obligation to fill space… whereas I am perpetually unsatisfied, you easily find pleasure in the underrated and understated — a fridge cold chocolate bar, a plan-free Saturday.”
― Vivek Shraya, I'm Afraid of Men.