manhood quotes

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age a regret.

- Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
  Coningsby, bk.3, ch.1.

My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires, My manhood, long misled by wandering fires, Followed false lights; and when their glimpse was gone My pride struck out new sparkles of her own† Good life be now my task: my doubts are done; (What more could fright my faith thanThree in One?)

-John Dryden
  The Hind and the Panther, pt.1, l.71^6.

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby†he has slowlyaccumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

-T(homas) H(enry) Huxley
  Man's Place in Nature.

The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

- D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
  'Piano'.

Thereare womentoday who never thoughtto envy men their manhood, but who would, at least for this purpose, be glad to be men.

- Emmeline ne  e  Goulden Pankhurst
  Speech appealing for the right to fight, 30 Nov, at a meeting organized by theWomen's Social and Political Union, in the Kingsway Hall, London.

What would happen if†men could menstruate and women could not? Clearly, menstruationwould become an enviable, boast-worthy, masculine event: Men would brag about how long and how much.Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood† Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite †'mens-truation'as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat† If men could menstruate, the power justifications would go on and on. If we let them.

- Gloria Steinem
  'If Men could Menstruate', collected in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983).

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

- Henry David Thoreau
  Journal entry,19 Feb.

'Tis midnight, falls the lamp-light dull and sickly On a pale and anxious crowd, Through the court, and round the judges thronging thickly, With prayers they dare not speak aloud Two youths, two noble youths, stand prisoners at the bar You can see them through the gloom In the pride of life and manhood's beauty, there they are Awaiting their death-doom.

-Jane Francesca ne  e Elgee Wilde
'The Brothers'.