"Self-torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (Brahmin) ascetic, or naked philosopher, as the Greeks called him, exhausted his imagination in devising schemes of self-torture. He buried himself with his nose just above the ground, or wore an iron collar, or suspended weights from his body. He clenched his fists until the nails grew into his palms, or kept his head turned in one direction until he was unable to turn it back. He was a miracle-worker, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... for a bride, she lay heroically bearing pain, lacking the devotion she should have had, finding her reward in the memory of her husband's appreciation of her courage, and her occupation, perhaps her pleasure, in a refinement of self-torture. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... shook the saddle, making up, in volume, what it lacked in sincerity. The blood in him was a-jump at the prospect of leading his Heart's Desire up next the clouds—up where the world was yet young. A man in love is fond of self-torture. ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... 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
... restore him, and during the first two hours of digestion he was comparatively peaceful in being able to live without thinking; but when the body had recovered its vigour, the mind grew active, and the self-torture recommenced. For some hours—he never knew how many—he suffered in this way; then a strange calm fell upon him. Was it the Divine help which had come at last, or despair, or the fatigue of an overwrought spirit? He knelt down and ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... formed an academy called The Synapothanoumenes, who had for their object the idea of dying together. In Western Europe, as shown in the ceremonies of the Druids, we find among the Celts a propensity for suicide and an indifference to self-torture. The Gauls were similarly minded, believing in the dogma of immortality and eternal repose. They thought little of bodily cares and ills. In Greece and Rome there was always an apology for suicide and death in the books of the philosophers. "Nil igitur mors est, ad nos neque ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... a great change. The beautiful face that had lured him once into the jaws of death was dominated now by a wistful and tender sadness, as though this girl had gone through an epoch of self-torture since they ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... 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)
... 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 would seek what man could not give him. They would know, those great trees that had seen ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... in man's nature and his possibilities which no plummet has ever sounded,—the wild, lonely joys of fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we understand the facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, of those men and women who have found such strange raptures in slow tortures, prolonged from year to year, till ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 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 |
