Self-torture Quotes

If we rail and kick against it and grow bitter, we won't change the inevitable; but we will change ourselves. I know. I have tried it. I once refused to accept an inevitable situation with which I was confronted. I played the fool and railed against it, and rebelled. I turned my nights into hells of insomnia. I brought upon myself everything I didn't want. Finally, after a year of self-torture, I had to accept what I knew from the outset I couldn't possible alter.

Women are their own worst enemies. And guilt is the main weapon of self-torture . . . Show me a woman who doesn't feel guilty and I'll show you a man.

There is no pain equal to that which two lovers can inflict on one another... It is when we begin to hurt those whom we love that the guilt with which we are born becomes intolerable, and since all those whom we love intensely and continuously grow part of us, and since we hate ourselves in them, so we torture ourselves and them together.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!

I'm not going to stop torturing myself till I figure out the cause of my pain.

Because golf exposes the flaws of the human swing - a basically simple maneuver - it causes more self-torture than any game short of Russian roulette.

Are we not all flung into the world for no other purpose than to hate each other, and so to torture ourselves and one another?

I apologise now to everybody for being the way I've been. What I was doing, torturing myself over an illness, is horrible. You push them away because you're trying to quantify what's gone on.

One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

Teach me, 0 God, not to torture myself, not to make a martyr out of myself through stifling reflection, but rather teach me to breathe deeply in faith.

One of the keys to learning for me has been to not get so hung up on the past. It's important to remember the past, but that doesn't mean you have to torture yourself with it by reliving it every single day.

Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

I think the difference between being miserable and finding happiness is just a matter of perspective. If you live your life defining yourself by what other people think of you, it's a form of self-torture.

What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity

There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in this life. Don't let the man who doesn't love you be one of them.

The mind is the result of the torments the flesh undergoes or inflicts upon itself.

Beauty is what attracts men naturally, but really I think we dress for other women, not necessarily for men. We torture ourselves every single day, and I wish that we wouldn't because we should all just get along, really.

The thing that really matters to me is well-being and happiness. Maybe it comes from knowing people who have tortured themselves trying to meet these strangely narrow and rigorous definitions of what our culture thinks is beautiful.

Life is too short to torture yourself for no reason.

That's a weird way to torture yourself. Just watch a movie, over and over, that you hate. That's really funny - that's probably exactly what hell is like.

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.

To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more.

Man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the desert has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture-chamber, an unsafe and hazardous wilderness- this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing and despair, became the inventor of 'bad conscience'.