"Masculinity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... physical characteristics. No woman desires a beard, because a beard means care and trouble, and would detract from feminine beauty, but to have a strong and, in appearance, a resolute under-jaw may be considered a desirable note of masculinity, and of masculine power and privilege, in the good time coming. Hence the cultivation of it by the chewing of gum is a recognizable and reasonable instinct, and the practice can be defended as neither a whim nor a vain waste of energy and nervous force. In a generation ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mocking Ionic spirit has penetrated—and the Ionian women occupied even a lower position than those of the Dorians and Aeolians—it has resulted in a glorification of masculinity. Hand in hand with this depreciation of the female sex go other characteristics which point to Hellenic influences: lack of commercial morality, of veracity, of seriousness in religious matters; a persistent, light-hearted inquisitiveness; a levity (or sprightliness, if you prefer ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the period which followed, there came into existence, spontaneously, a principle, which after another lapse of time resolved itself into two principles with entirely opposite characteristics. One of these principles represented light, heat, masculinity, and similar phenomena classed as positive; the other represented darkness, cold, femininity, and other phenomena classed as negative. The interaction of these two principles in duly adjusted proportions ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... the West a "real scout." It is a mere truism to say that his personality had conquered the West, as it had won for him affection everywhere. His straightforward masculinity and his entire lack of side, his cheerfulness and his keenness, his freedom from "frills," as one man put it, had made him the friend of everybody. I heard practically the same expressions of real affection ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... undertaken it must be done boldly. The spirit of the old rhyme above quoted must be acted upon, or fear will paralyze the efforts put forth, and failure will be the result. In choral singing, as in other things, the masculinity of the doing, the boldness, the daring, the very audacity with which an extreme effect is produced, carries success with it. Therefore do not attempt a daring thing ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... and his huge masculinity looked ludicrously incongruous as he bent over the low table and scraped at the tin plates with his thumb nail or squinted into the lard buckets, of which there ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... the kind," said Jack a trifle testily—so soon does conventional masculinity champion the conservatism of the other sex! "That was just as I was going—gone, in fact. I looked back and she had drawn her veil aside. The moon was bright on her face—I saw her as clear as daylight, and I tell you that ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... bears his children, she nurses them, she does his work, she chops his wood, and she grinds his corn; while he, forsooth, by virtue of this patent of nobility that he has derived, in consequence of his masculinity, from Heaven, confines himself to the manly occupations of hunting and fishing ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... these months he had grown to hate Brandon, but he had come, more and more, to despise and condemn him. The effeminacy in his own nature had from the first both shrunk from and been attracted by the masculinity in Brandon. ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... roughest class of men both on sea and land during the last two years, and the more important I think the "mission" of every quiet, refined, self-respecting woman—the more mistaken I think those who would forfeit it by noisy self-assertion, masculinity, or fastness. In all this wild West the influence of woman is second only in its benefits to the influence of religion, and where the last unhappily does not exist the first continually exerts its restraining power. ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... which that English mother in the poem fears. The foreboding itself seems to belong to a barbaric society in which there is a more animal division of the sexes, in which the male fears to become effeminate if he does not insist upon his masculinity even to his mother. But this Frenchman has left barbarism so far behind that he is not afraid of effeminacy; nor does he need to remind himself that he is a male. There is a philosophy to which this forgetfulness of masculinity is decadence. According to that philosophy, man ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and the "bliss of Heaven;" the difference between mortals and gods; the character of a bi-une Being; erroneous ideas of masculinity and femininity; the change of the present day toward these ideas; God not a hermaphroditic Personality, but a pair; some "laws of God;" the ideal of union versus the idea of possession; the highest manifestation of sex-love; the solar-man and the mental man in sex; qualities ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... propositions before. It was a perennial threat which in the passing of years had lost its power to terrify. Yet with the inevitable feminine impulse to smooth the feathers of ruffled masculinity, she began, "When I drove by ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... conventional training, Nathalie, whose temperament contained a strong dash of masculinity, was quite eleven years old before she began to turn her vivid imagination to dreams of distant debutantism or still remoter officers, who, in the most brilliant of uniforms, should appear at miraculous moments in her career, bringing shame and jealousy to armies ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in her uniform was sufficiently suggestive, as has been said, of robust masculinity to attract the favourable attention of many young women. What she had not counted upon was the arousing in one of these girls of a degree of interest which should imperil her secret. Her chagrin, the third morning after the doctor's discovery, was appreciably deepened, therefore, by ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... did introduce a certain hardness, or masculinity, into the cultured life of the country which gave an opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which had become poetic habits among English poets and lovers of poetry. I say the "Kipling epoch," for Mr. Kipling himself never had the self-discipline, perhaps ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... the voice of Mrs Olliver, a rough-cut Irishwoman, whose short reddish curls, and masculinity of speech and manner, cloaked the woman's heart that glowed deep down in her,—a jewel crusted with common clay. Beside her stood Max Richardson, and Colonel Meredith—a big, broad-shouldered man, extraordinarily like his sister in face and temperament—who cleared the steps like any ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... that she had achieved victory over Sleep. Indeed, there was everywhere a symbolism, wonderful even in a land and an age of symbolism. Prominence was given to the fact that she, though a Queen, claimed all the privileges of kingship and masculinity. In one place she was pictured in man's dress, and wearing the White and Red Crowns. In the following picture she was in female dress, but still wearing the Crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, while the discarded male raiment lay at her feet. In every picture where hope, or aim, of ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... been few, and for that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it, the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a great many male painters showing too many signs of ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... personal memories for it, writing in fact that one novel of which every man is said to be capable, time and the publishing lists will show. I shall certainly be interested to see. Meanwhile the fact that despite his name GEORGE—always an object of the gravest suspicion—I accept his masculinity without question is my tribute both to the balance of his style and to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... close atmosphere of the home enveloped and stifled him once more. How different was this exasperating interior from the large jolly freedom of the Empire Music Hall, and from the whisky, cigarettes and masculinity of that private room ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... unpinned Stetson to the back of her head with a careless gesture; it was a man's gesture and her strong hand beneath the stiff cuff of her tailored shirtwaist strengthened the impression of masculinity. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... photographs, or whether he had travelled in Japan and the obscure corners of the earth in the flesh or in books. There was more than the wonted necessity upon her to establish sympathetic relations with this new man: she had never seen a finer presence: the beard and brow quite lifted his masculinity into aesthetic regions; she caught glimpses, too, of an unfamiliar mongrel species of intellect with which she would relish Platonic relations. Yet with this glow upon her she regarded the reformer's noble face and benignant blond beard doubtfully, thinking how she used to stick pins in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... spiritual [Symbol: Gold] and [Symbol: Silver], the male and female seed, the dust of the Adamah from Schamajim, and therefore had the power to multiply himself magically (just as he was celestial) which could not indeed have been otherwise, unless the essential masculinity and femininity were dissociated." I am reminded in this connection that Mercury is also bisexual; the "materia" must be brought into the androgynic state "rebis." The idea of hermaphroditism plays a well known, important part ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... little clinking of buckles and buttons. She flung her motor gloves on a near-by chair, ran an inquiring finger along belt and collar with a little gesture that was absurdly feminine in its imitation of masculinity. Buck did not sit down. He stood at the opposite side of the table, one hand on his chair, the knuckles showing white where ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... socials for charity, and the usual run of things; all of which, however, failed to wholly satisfy the men. Down in the town there was a totally different though equally popular other side. As the country was too young for club-life, the masculine portion of the community expressed its masculinity by herding together in the saloons,—the ministers and missionaries being the only exceptions to this mode of expression. Business appointments and deals were made and consummated in the saloons, enterprises projected, shop talked, the latest news ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... their noses disjointed by this tribunal. But their great age and the familiarity of their presence had softened the decree in its enforcement. The Novel was a young offender in aspect (though he had the nature and inheritance of the other three), and was, besides, strong in masculinity and virility. A certain sympathy thus sprung up for the three quaint old ladies, as for old offenders whose persistence had won the wink of toleration. They actually achieved a certain factitious respectability ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... full of women's shoulders and black patches of masculinity; the violent chatter died into a profound silence; every face was turned towards him. He nearly fell down dead on the doormat, and then, remembering that life was after all sweet, he plunged into the room ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett |
