"Self-torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Camille, that was true; no nationality, for she could never tell from whom or whence she came; no friends, and a beauty that not even an ungainly bonnet and shaven head could hide. In a flash she realised the deception of the life she would lead, and the cruel self-torture of wonder at her own identity. Already, as if in anticipation of the world's questionings, she was asking herself, "Who am ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... his maddening passions, a perverse delight in self-torture had taken possession of Paul; and his mind so hungered for more intense excitement, that it craved to prove true all which its jealousy and superstition had imaged. He had walked on, lost in this fearful riot, but with no particular object in view, and taking only ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the same lady whom we speak of in the first part of this chapter, relates her experience with a sister nun, who endured self-torture, believing that it was an outward demonstration ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... to him, the invincible horror and repugnance she felt would be suddenly revealed by a chance look or intonation—and he saw it and writhed in secret. And yet he went everywhere that there was a possibility of meeting her, with a restless impulse of self-torture, while his hate grew more ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing *again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles, either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable form of self-torture ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... distracting interests that in these days crowd in upon the mind, than to a lack of natural aptitude. The absorbing interest, however, is essential, and it may be developed by conforming to well-known principles of orthodox psychology. Self-torture or hard driving is not nearly as helpful as a strong inner purpose to keep the chosen subject in the real center ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... had held unflinchingly to its task through every stress of self-torture, succumbed under the relief of confession, and as he himself had said, there was but little time left him to fill his eyes and heart with the sight of this strong man who had replaced his ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... throwing them into the Ganges, or by the Rajpoot secret method of infanticide; to encourage men to throw away their lives under temple cars and in other ways of religious devotion; to encourage various forms of voluntary self-torture and self-mutilation; to outrage girls under ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... was so rotten with them that only the twigs and string kept it from tumbling to pieces and walking off quadrivious, it came to table. By a malicious caprice of fate, cage and menagerie were put down right under the Dutchman's organ of self-torture. He recoiled with a loud ejaculation, and hung to the bench by ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... requires a conscience, or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries are crammed with books written ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... jingling on the gravel at my feet. They are simply hemispheres of sheet-brass, and fitted closely over the eyeballs, beneath the lids. The conjurer's eyes water visibly after the brass covers are removed; and well enough they might; there is no sleight-of-hand about this—it is purely an act of self-torture. ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... a Catholic, and therefore attaching more value to self-torture than we do, the poor soul made this very grove her place of penance. Once a week she had the fortitude to drag herself to the very spot where Griffith had denounced her; and there she would kneel and pray for him and for herself. And certainly, if humility and self-abasement were qualities of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... absolute. Of all the mystics he was the most speculative and philosophical. Both Henry Suso and John Tauler were his disciples. [Sidenote: Suso, 1300-66] Suso's ecstatic piety was of the ultra-medieval type, romantic, poetic, and bent on winning personal salvation by the old means of severe self-torture and the constant practice of good works. Tauler, a Dominican of Strassburg, belonged to a society known as The Friends of God. [Sidenote: Tauler c. 1300-61] Of all his contemporaries he in religion was the most social and practical. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... visions, waken as I was, and think of everything dreadful that might happen to my cousin, and confess to my own heart how I loved him now, and hated myself for having treated him as I had, and revel, as it were, in self-reproach and self-torture. It was broad daylight ere I fell into a sort of fitful dose, so out-wearied and over-excited was I, ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... of Madge came self-torture for his unfaithfulness. He scourged himself into what he considered to be his duty. He recalled with an effort all Madge's charms, mental and bodily, and he tried to break his heart for her. He was in anguish ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... and in excellent working order. Their abrupt obedience was disconcerting. Some one must have been drilling them, thought their anxious teacher, in the art of simultaneous squatting. The temper of the class respecting scholastic deportment leaned towards rigidity bordering on self-torture. ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Truth was somewhere, he was sure; it must be found if only it be looked for with patience and sincerity, and he would find it. Surely there was a greater wisdom than mere contempt of wealth and comfort, surely a greater happiness than could be found in self-torture and hysteria. And so, as he could find no one to teach him, he went out into the forest to look for truth there. In the great forest where no one comes, where the deer feed and the tiger creeps, he ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter S; some were head downwards, some in a cruciform position. It was really quite monstrous, says ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... from its native soil, that of the lowest orders, the underworld of the ancient world, and began seeking power among barbarian peoples, it no longer had to deal with exhausted men, but with men still inwardly savage and capable of self-torture—in brief, strong men, but bungled men. Here, unlike in the case of the Buddhists, the cause of discontent with self, suffering through self, is not merely a general sensitiveness and susceptibility to pain, but, on ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... innate "hell" in them—as almost all moralists have done hitherto. Does it not seem that there is a hatred of the virgin forest and of the tropics among moralists? And that the "tropical man" must be discredited at all costs, whether as disease and deterioration of mankind, or as his own hell and self-torture? And why? In favour of the "temperate zones"? In favour of the temperate men? The "moral"? The mediocre?—This for the chapter: ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... did not see that his own self-torture had filled him with primeval lust to torture in return. He only knew that his brilliant paper must remain forever incomplete, since his services to science were continually unappreciated and misunderstood. What was one yellow ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... of heresy which characterized the thirteenth century—naturalism with its tendency to magic, astrology, alchemy, etc., etc., and mysticism with its dreams of beatific visions, its self-torture and its lawlessness (see Goerres, 'Die Christliche Mystik')—were due largely to Averroes. In spite of this, his commentaries on Aristotle maintained their credit, their influence being greatest in the fourteenth century, when his doctrines ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... stretch out the rope, and by his jerking movements loosening himself by tearing out the flesh. The young man's dance was accompanied by a chant by those who were standing around, assisted by the thumping of a hideous drum, to keep the time. The young brave who was undergoing this self-torture finally succeeded in tearing himself loose, and the rope relaxed from its sudden tightness and fell back toward the centre pole with a piece of the flesh to which it was tied. The victim, who, up to this point, ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... trumpery self-torture! You know this is a mere farrago that you have conjured up. Your father would neither thrust you into danger, nor compel you to do anything to which you had a reasonable aversion. Go and be a man about it in one way or the other! Either accept or refuse, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strive for the happiness and salvation of all beings, but this beautiful truth may be sadly perverted if it is held that the endurance of pain is in itself meritorious and that such acquired merit can be transferred to others. Self-torture, seems not to be unknown in the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... was valued at what it cost the giver, and was supposed to be efficacious in this same ratio, self-denial soon passed into self-torture, prolonged fasts, scourging and lacerations, thus becoming legitimate exhibitions of religious fervor. As mental pain is as keen as bodily pain, the suffering of Jephthah was quite as severe as ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... classify the evils actually produced. Religion injures individuals by prescribing useless and painful practices: fasting, celibacy, voluntary self-torture, and so forth. It suggests vague terrors which often drive the victim to insanity, and it causes remorse for harmless enjoyments.[621] Religion injures society by creating antipathies against unbelievers, and in a less degree against heretics ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... him, and says in a low voice:] Because I seem to find a sort of—of salutary self-torture in allowing Aline to ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... souls. "There is no place in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affections, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato." (Lecky: "History ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... it, and sat up in her bed crying and shivering in the silence and solitude of night, where even by day all was silent and solitary. She began to think that she would never see Redcross or her mother again. With the morbid sentimentality of early youth, and its lively capacity for self-torture, in which to be sure there is that underlying luxury of woe, she commenced to rehearse the loving farewells she would take on paper, and the harrowing last messages she would send to ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... from far away, Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the ordered universe, where ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... in or even affection towards another member of the female sex does not mean the death of love, or even diminished love, half of the battle would be won. Half of the misery, half of the quarrels, half of the self-torture, half of the disrupted homes, in short, half of the tyrannical reign of the demon of jealousy, ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... nature, complain of the heartlessness of mankind. They fancy themselves peculiarly the victims of an unkind destiny in this respect; and finally cut their throats in a moment of frenzy, or degenerate into a cynicism that delights in contradictions, in sarcasms, in self-torture, and the bitterest hostility to ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms |
