Top 80 Masculinity Quotes

It just makes me laugh, when you talk to people who are ‘typical’ men, masculine, they watch sports and they can armchair quarterback, but they don’t do anything themselves and they judge your masculinity.

Being pretty… I’m just confused about it. I mean, I love getting my nails done, but I also like dressing like a boy. I think I feel most myself when I’m mixing femininity and masculinity. Like, fifty-fifty.

I would say that’s at the center of masculinity in the 21st century: How do you become comfortable enough that you can feel stronger by opening up to another human being, rather than the instinct, which is, the more closed off you are, the stronger you are because you’re not vulnerable?

It’s undeniable that what we are taught as a culture to believe about disability is at odds with traditional notions of masculinity.

Hedi Slimane told me I was boyish in his eyes. For him femininity and masculinity are the same thing, the difference is not so interesting, he said.

Violence has always been unfortunately embedded in masculinity, this alpha thing.

It’s good to see a man who isn’t afraid to live out his masculinity.

I think all of my male characters, I suppose, in all of my films, they’re not necessarily the traditional version of masculinity.

The Western is as American as a film can get – there’s the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There’s a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I’ve always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.

For me, masculinity is about control, and femininity is more of an embrace, the art of listening. It’s very inspiring to explore the shadows of masculinity and femininity, and the tensions between both, and the place of women in the world right now.

Toughening up, performing masculinity, pretending to enjoy things I didn’t enjoy all enabled me to dodge the gender policing of the adults around me. But the way I really was – the swished hips, the Double-Dutching, the hair flips – seemed to always prevail and attract Dad’s disdain.

Sometimes, how you ingest this idea of masculinity as projected onto you by the world could be the difference of life and death.

The scripture is filled with examples of genuine masculinity; you could mine David’s story for probably a year by itself. And we have to get the masculinity of Jesus back. Not the pale-faced altar boy, but the man that made a weapon and cleared the temple, who boldly cast out demons and calmed the raging sea.

This idea that my work is about hip-hop is a little reductive. What I’m interested in is the performance of masculinity, the performance of ethnicity, and how they intermingle across cultures.

If the KKK was smart enough, they would’ve created gangsta rap because it’s such a caricature of black culture and black masculinity.

Masculinity comes from your look, all the way down to your attitude. It’s a big part of being a tennis player. Even though tennis is a fairly friendly sport, intimidation is still a big part of it.

High respect goes out to our mothers, our single mothers. This is why today the real community uplifts femininity and holds womanhood above, not equal to, masculinity.

In terms of style I typically veer toward a certain masculinity. My style inspirations range from images of my father in his 1970s suits, to Tilda Swinton, to Hugh Hefner, to Sharon Stone and her ferocious sexuality, to handsome men I see on the streets of New York.

Black men struggle with masculinity so much. The idea that we must always be strong really presses us all down – it keeps us from growing.

A lot of writers, probably because they’re sensitive, which makes them want to be writers, have fears about their masculinity, so they overcompensate by having an interest in boxing and tough-guy things.

I have no memory of feeling strong and rugged at any point. I’ve been considering masculinity my whole life.

It’s great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential. Real civilization and real manhood seem to me to include those.

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

We’re still trying to figure out how to let men be vulnerable, to realize there’s strength in vulnerability, and that it’s how you fill out the circle of masculinity.

One of the things I’ve been interested in my whole career is exploring masculinity and what it means to be a man. The sensitivity of a man, but also the violence and power that goes along with it.

Masculinity is kind of a toxic curse, isn’t it? The expectations of it were hard on me.

Hey, I’m comfortable with my masculinity.

I guess all of us have a little bit of both masculinity and femininity, and bridging the gap between those two things is really fertile.

Ask Bond-watchers of a certain age about the six actors who have slipped into Bond’s Savile Row suits in the Broccoli franchise, and they might say it’s really Connery and five other guys – since he, being first and being Sean, stamped the role with his sulfurous masculinity.

I wasn’t like the rest of the kids. I was an artist. Living in a black society, when you’re raised around a bunch of boys who plays sports and chase girls, there’s this perception of masculinity that’s super hard to fit into. I wasn’t the stereotype of that like a lot of my peers were.

I consciously learned and performed my race like a teacher’s pet in an advanced placement course on black masculinity.

Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn’t killed our hearts. It’s killed men’s hearts. It’s silenced them; it’s cut them off.

We rarely see cisgender heterosexual men in positions where they’re nurturers. We only paint femmes, trans women, and cis women as nurturers, and because of toxic masculinity, men are taught not to be that way.

With more women in the workplace and in positions of power and leadership, with the legalization of gay marriage and the emerging liberation of the LGBTQ community, traditional definitions of masculinity are changing for the better.

My uncles, who are farmers in Minooka, Illinois – I grew up with them and their pickup trucks and mustaches, and to me that was masculinity: big hairy sweaty guys who could pick up a bus.

No man represents toxic white masculinity more than Donald Trump.

I want to show straight men and gay men alike that self-care and grooming isn’t mutually exclusive with, like, femininity or masculinity.

Trump’s America means many things, but this much is clear – it means toxic white masculinity is not just permitted, it’s fully empowered – and getting worse.

I think a case could be made that there’s sort of a crisis of masculinity in the West. Particularly with white males.

Some of the sexiest things to me in a man are confidence, authenticity, honesty, kindness and masculinity.

All I can do is seek the information that’ll make me stronger, that’ll help me overcome my toxic masculinity, my male privilege, because that’s something you never think about. You don’t think about other people.

Men in Rajasthan pride themselves on their moustaches. It is a sign of their masculinity.

You’d think true masculinity was just calm and collected happiness. So alpha male that it needs not or worries not. But typically masculine characters are always fighting, and most violence comes from some agitated level of fear and anxiety.

There’s a great sense of achievement, testosterone, fun, being able to live out your masculinity when you play an action role or an action-adventure or a real tough-guy role.

For many young men, joining in a radical movement is a way of feeling powerful, which is particularly intoxicating for men who feel their masculinity has been called into question, whether through victimisation or a failure to achieve the status that they feel they are entitled to.

My own experience of gender has been about a lot of fluidity. In drag, I like to combine aspects of masculinity and femininity and rewrite the rules for those.

I was so aware of the stage clothes versus the everyday-life clothes, and the extremeness of the stage clothes that my parents had designed. Even coming across my dad’s old Beatles suits from Savile Row and the history attached to them – the masculinity and simplicity compared to the ’70s glitz and glamour of Wings.

You have an ideal of masculinity to live up to, and then there’s everything else on top. You have to be a perfect husband. You have to be in shape. Apart from alcohol and exercise, there are very few outlets for men.

For the same reason I want to make movies about women, I also want to make movies that help men be better men and that can be an antidote to toxic masculinity.

I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they try to question traditional notions of masculinity and the sort of toxic nature of traditional ways of presenting masculinity.