William Faulkner Quotes on Man (24 Quotes)

And when I think about that, I think that if nothing but being married will help a man, he's durn nigh hopeless.

Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he aint. Sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it's the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it.

That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.

He never denied it. He never did anything. He never acted like either a nigger or a white man. That was it. That was what made the folks so mad.

It is the man who all his life has been self-convicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

When it's a matter of not-do, I reckon a man can trust himself for advice. But when it comes to a matter of doing, I reckon a fellow had better listen to all the advice he can get.

A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune

Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, th.

It is his the poet's, the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. See Poets Writers.

I decline to accept the end of man.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work -- a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust.

Man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

Man performs and engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.

Too much happens.... Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That's how he finds that he can bear anything.... That's what's so terrible.

Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder.

Man knows so little about his fellows. In his eyes all men or women act upon what he believes would motivate him if he were mad enough to do what that other man or woman is doing.

People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can't know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do -- after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours -- all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

Poor man. Poor mankind.

It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail