The Everyman archetype celebrates the virtue of being the common man; giving people a sense of belonging.
100 Inspirational Quotes for Everyman
We’ve collected the best quotes about everyman for you to read through.
This selection of quotations are based solely on my personal taste and are in no particular order. You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favourite quotes.
Are you an Everyman? Find out with this FREE Quiz →
Checkout this list of everyman quotes:
1. Matt Damon
“I’m not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Those guys walk into a room and the room changes. I think there’s something more… not average, but everyman about me.”
2. Ricky Gervais
“When I go to work, I don’t want to make depressing, gritty, urban stories that are depressing to watch. I want to give people something to enjoy. When people think I’m a control freak and an ogre – which I am – it’s only because I want my work to be accessible and Everyman, in a way.”
3. Bo Burnham
“For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, ‘This crazy thing happened to me the other day.’ And he’s in front of 3000 people, and he’s acting like an everyman, and he’s getting paid so much money.”
4. Robert Anton Wilson
“History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce’s view of Everyman as victim.”
5. Christopher Walken
“I certainly have never been an actor who can play the Everyman guy – or, I don’t tend to get those parts. I’ve tended to play eccentrics. I’ve played a lot of villains, of course.”
6. Peter Abrahams
“I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. ‘Lamb’s Tales’ from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury.’ These two books, and the ‘Everyman’ edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.”
7. Tim Sweeney
“Unity is a kind of engine for the everyman.”
8. Jared Padalecki
“There are a lot of actors that I really love to watch, actors who I have fun watching – I think Johnny Depp is phenomenal. But I wouldn’t want that career as much as I’d like a career like Tom Hanks – he kind of represents the everyman.”
9. Jason Bateman
“I really enjoy playing that everyman part because that part is us, the audience. And you need somebody inside a comedy to tether the absurdity to reality.”
10. Maren Morris
“Being the everyman in the writing room helps a lot: you have to be a real collaborator and selfless, and not have ego when you walk in there. That’s the antithesis of the artist mentality.”
11. Channing Tatum
“It’s a hard thing for me to wrap my mind around the C word: celebrity. Rock stars are celebrities because they’re larger than life. As an actor, you have to play the everyman and the everygirl. If you start treating people in the real world like assistants, that’s not a good look. But my friends keep me grounded.”
12. Michael Eric Dyson
“George Bush ran a campaign where he bragged about being an anti-intellectual, dismissing his Harvard and Yale pedigree, pretending he was an American every day, ordinary everyman, and as a result of that, played up his fumbling speech because it signified that he was a good guy. That is deeply and profoundly anti-intellectual.”
13. S.E. Hinton
“The thing is, the Tulsa experience that I wrote about in ‘The Outsiders’ is closer to the universal experience than it would be if I wrote it from L.A. or New York. It’s an everyman story.”
14. Billy Gardell
“You need a wisecracking buddy standing next to you? That’s the role for me. You got the guys who are knock-down, drag-out handsome. That’s what people want to see. Let that guy be the hero. But there’s always a role for the Everyman.”
15. Alex O’Loughlin
“I’m the son of an everyman. My father is a teacher. He teaches physics at a boys’ school in Sydney.”
16. John Hughes
“I happen to go for the simplest, most ordinary things. The extraordinary doesn’t interest me. I’m not interested in psychotics. I’m interested in the person you don’t expect to have a story. I like Everyman.”
17. Joe Piscopo
“I am that ‘everyman’ in that I have made every mistake you can make in your career and in your personal life. But I am a survivor.”
18. Rod McKuen
“For many people, I was a phase, a part of the period of growing up. People ask me why I connected. It was presumptuous of me to say, but I’m Everyman. The difference is I put my thoughts into words.”
19. Eugene Kennedy
“In April, God speaks to us in the seas whose rhythmic murmuring fills our ears from a long way off. It was in April that the Titanic went down into the deep to lie like a slasher’s victim, bleeding the ‘debris field’ – its passengers’ personal possessions, the everyday things of everyman and everywoman – across the ocean’s floor.”
20. Martin Henderson
“I’ve got to say, I like being the everyman.”
21. Lydia Millet
“Trophy hunters are not Everyman. These world-traveling endangered-species shooters are a far cry from the hunters who spend weekends in the American outback near their suburban or rural homes.”
22. Eric Bischoff
“DDP was the common guy, the everyman, a blue-collar guy from New Jersey. He represented something that the average person could believe in, in a way that was a little unique.”
23. Andy Roddick
“I’ve pretty much been portrayed as every style thing you can be. After Wimbledon you are Andy Everyman, who everybody is rooting for. I think the meat and potatoes of who I am hasn’t been covered yet.”
24. Jason Segel
“Kermit was the Everyman, the original Tom Hanks, but I have a special place in my heart for Fozzie Bear. The classic borderline hacky entertainer.”
25. Andrew Scott
“I’ve played all these extreme guys but playing an everyman type has its own challenges.”
26. Corey Hawkins
“Eric Carter is a more raw, more emotional protagonist. He’s a bit of an Everyman.”
27. Stephen Graham
“I was 10, and I played Jim Hawkins in ‘Treasure Island’ at school, and this great Liverpudlian actor called Andrew Schofield – he was Johnny Rotten in ‘Sid And Nancy’ – came to watch it, and he had a word with my mum and dad afterwards and told them I should have a go at the Everyman youth theatre. I’ve never looked back.”
28. Tobias Menzies
“The success of ‘Rome’ was in making the history accessible and giving viewers everyman characters through which they can connect to historical figures. It stops the story from being too remote.”
29. Morgan Neville
“Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who’s the person you’d rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it’s a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.”
30. John Frankenheimer
“I sought Ben Affleck because I needed an everyman for this role. Ben appeals to men and women. He gives you a sense of intelligence, the notion of a guy who can think on his feet.”
31. Judge Reinhold
“In my movies, I portray this ‘Everyman’ persona, someone everybody can empathize with. People can identify with a guy like me.”
32. Gil Gerard
“It’s more fun having him as everyman in the 25th Century. It is better to concentrate on what this planet will be like 500 years from now, and not be dealing with little aliens in space and all that related stuff.”
33. Kato Kaelin
“I’m the guy, I’m kind of like the, uh, Everyman, so I think people just relate to that.”
34. David Costabile
“Because I look like Everyman on some level, I would say I get recognized once or twice a day.”
35. Kenny Ortega
“Patrick Swayze reminded me a lot of Gene Kelly. Patrick had that Everyman quality. Gene made dancing sort of an accessible idea for the regular guy out there.”
36. Kathe Koja
“Patrick Swayze reminded me a lot of Gene Kelly. Patrick had that Everyman quality. Gene made dancing sort of an accessible idea for the regular guy out there.”
37. Voltaire
“A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.”
38. Henry Miller
“Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.”
39. Thomas Jefferson
“The way to have good and safe government is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to everyone exactly the functions in which he is competent … It is by dividing and subdividing these Republics from the great national one down through all its subordinations until it ends in the administration of everyman’s farm by himself, by placing under everyone what his own eye may superintend, that all will be done for the best.”
40. Henry Miller
“Everyday we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read the lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Everyman, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.”
41. Philip Zimbardo
“In contrast to the “banality of evil,” which posits that ordinary people can be responsible for the most despicable acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellows, I posit the “banality of heroism,” which unfurls the banner of the heroic Everyman and Everywoman who heed the call to service to humanity when their time comes to act. When that bell rings, they will know that it rings for them. It sounds a call to uphold what is best in human nature that rises above the powerful pressures of Situation and System as the profound assertion of human dignity opposing evil.”
42. Jack Lemmon
“People are probably correct when they see me as the so-called Everyman. I’m attracted primarily to contemporary characters. I understand them and their frustrations.”
43. David Fincher
“We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that societal emasculation this everyman is created.”
44. Bob Seger
“It’s a rite of passage for the everyman, to a higher ground.”
45. Benoit Mandelbrot
“Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics, but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.”
46. Sho Baraka
“I wanted to create a story that would address America’s history, successes, and problems while pointing to a hopeful resolution. I wanted it to be told from the perspective of an “Everyman” point of view.”
47. Kenneth Patchen
“Everyman is me. I am his brother. No man is my enemy. I am Everyman and he is in and of me. This is my faith, my strength, my deepest hope, and my only belief.”
48. John Ruskin
“Much of the character of everyman may be read in his house.”
49. Ron Fournier
“Movies such as ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ in 1939 to ‘Dave’ in 1993 portray Washington leaders as the ultimate Everymen – decent people just like you and me, only thrust onto greatness.”
50. Allen Ginsberg
“Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!”
51. John Jakes
“Libraries are everyman’s free university.”
52. Thomas Merton
“Every moment and every event of everyman’s life on earth plants something in his soul. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of men.”
53. Garrison Keillor
“Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed … And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we’ve been and the heroes we were.”
54. Vartan Gregorian
“One of my greatest sources of pride as president of the New York Public Library is the continuance of the library’s open, free, and democratic posture, the fact that we are here for Everyman, that we are indeed Everyman’s university, the place where the scholar who is not college-affiliated can come and work and feel at home.”
55. Herbert Read
“The greatest intensification of the horrors of war is a direct result of the democratisation of the State. So long as the army was a professional unit, the specialist function of a limited number of men, war remained a relatively harmless contest for power. But once it became everyman’s duty to defend his home (or his political “rights”) warfare was free to range wherever that home might be, and to attack every form of life and property associated with that home.”
56. H.L.Mencken
“Everyman is thoroughly happy twice in his life, just after he has met his first love, and just after he has left his last one.”
57. Simon Pegg
“I’ve only played two sort-of slackers, in Spaced and in Shaun Of The Dead. They’re different people, but they have the same kind of everyman quality, particularly as a twentysomething.”
58. Guy Garvey
“The British press isn’t as vicious as it used to be, and these days it’s sort of cool to care again. Everyone loves an everyman anthem.”
59. Mehmet Murat Ildan
“No man is disbeliever! Everyone is believer! All men believe in something! If a man does not believe in God, He is a believer too, because he simply believes that God does not exist! Don’t give yourself airs just because you believe in something since everyman believes in something! Always be humble!”
60. Andrew Dominik
“You obviously can’t cast Brad [Pitt] as an everyman guy because he just brings way too much baggage.”
61. Thomas Jefferson
“Where everyman is participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year but everyday, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.”
62. Ray Metzker
“I never wanted to make portraits – to photograph celebrities, beautiful people, beautiful landscapes, beautiful buildings, or people in distressing situations…. I have always been interested in everyman – average, ordinary people in everyday situations.”
63. Freema Agyeman
“I found a lot of comfort in the fact that 30-odd people have been companions before me. I think that when there are so many people contributing so many things to the show, all you can do is make it your own. You can’t try to emulate anyone, because who would you pick? The companions are very much the everyman, and the audience watches the story through their eyes, so they could be the person next door. And everybody’s different.”
64. Billy West
“In a black-and-white world, back in the ’50s, were voices from another era. All actors used to sound different. Robert Mitchum sounded different from John Wayne, and John Wayne sounded different from Clark Gable. They were like men’s voices, but they weren’t Everyman, it was them.”
65. Amir Taheri
“It is time we learnt that a terrorist is no man’s friend and everyman’s enemy.”
66. Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Man must behave like a lighthouse; he must shine day and night for the goodness of everyman.”
67. Shia LaBeouf
“People think that their vote counts. They go to college, and everything gets mixed up. People stop caring, … They raise the gas prices, but what the Everyman makes and welfare never seem to keep up. The HMO system is so ridiculous. I’m slightly educated. No one wants to hear what Hilary Duff thinks of the economy.”
68. Warren Farrell
“Every day, almost as many men are killed at work as were killed during the average day in Vietnam. For men, there are, in essence, three male-only drafts: the draft of men to all the wars; the draft of Everyman to unpaid bodyguard; the draft of men to all the hazardous jobs or ‘death professions.”
69. Kelsey Grammar
“The first thing I thought [when I read the script] was that Frasier was an intellectual at some points but also an Everyman – flawed and very insecure.”
70. Alexander Koch
“I’m hesitant to do leading man character roles because I think they can be a little boring in terms of needing to be the everyman who navigates the amazing stuff around them.”
71. Iris Origo
“…while it is certainly the biographer’s business to describe the foibles, passions and idiosyncrasies which make his subject a person, his work will be very meagre if these individual traits are not also seen as part of a universal drama – for each man’s life is also the story of Everyman.”
72. Margaret Mitchell
“All you have done is to be different from other women and you have made a little success of it. This is unforgivable sin in any society. The mere fact that you have succeed to run the mill is an insult to everyman who hasn’t succeed.”
73. Kurt Fuller
“I am not a member of the chamber of commerce for show business, believe me, but there are some really good people in the business, and [Tom] Hanks has this everyman decency onscreen, but he actually is that guy.”
74. Isaac Asimov
“[O]ur statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking.”
75. Steven Pressfield
“Making a judgment, taking a stand and then acting against an injustice or acting to support excellence is the stuff of the everyman hero. If you are an aspiring artist and you wish to avoid “judgments,” you’ll find that you have nothing to say.”
76. Sunday Adelaja
“The wealth God has given to everyman is the wealth of time”
77. Mehmet Murat Ildan
“Inside a dark well everyman’s favourite colour is blue.”
78. Bob Marley
“Everyman got a right to decide his own destiny.”
79. Paul Valery
“Everyman has his back to his death like the talker leaning against the mantelpiece.”
80. Marshall McLuhan
“The dyslexic: Everyman as cubist.”
81. Caleb Carr
“Gideon is unaware of it; he’s grown up in it, and accepts the shortcomings until — it’s sort of a typical Everyman situation — you accept the shortcomings until you get shoved up against an uncomfortable wall by them and have to look at them. And that’s what happens to him. It’s not a voluntary process.”
82. Kevin Reilly
“For me, the main thing about Andy is that he’s got that great combination of everyman with a subversive side to him, … I think he’s a guy you can relate to and pull for and yet he can be completely sarcastic and backhanded, and you totally love him for it.”
83. English Proverb
“Everyman is the architect of his own fortune”.
84. Plautus
“Every man, however wise, needs the advice of some sagacious friend in the affairs of life.”
85. John Locke
“Everyman has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to but himself.”
86. Proverb
“Everyman for himself and God for us all.”
87. Martin Heidegger
“Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.”
88. Ralph Waldo Emmerson
“Every man I meet is in some way my superior.”
89. David B Lentz
“How shall we embrace the common man: give us a good reason without a doubt? Is Everyman fated as an island unto himself ‘til his last bright day goes by?”
90. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of everyman.”
91. Martin Luther
“Every man must do two things alone: he must do his own believing and his own dying.”
92. Werner Herzog
“Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his lifetime.”
93. John Donne
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.”
94. Abraham Lincoln
“Every man is born an original, but sadly most men die copies.”
95. Rene Char
“Midnight is not in everyman’s reach.”
96. Mahatma Gandhi
“Earth provides enough to supply every man’s need but not every man’s greed.”
97. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knowns not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
98. Albert Einstein
“Ley every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized.”
99. Sinclair Lewis
“Every man is a king as long as he knows someone to look down on.”
100. Bruce Lee
“If every man would help his neighbour no man would be without help.”
