Quotes About Self-torture

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.

Wenn der Mensch sich selbst quälen kann, versäumt er so leicht keine Gelegenheit dazu.

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

One of the biggest causes of suffering is social comparison," Coleman said. "Status anxiety is a huge component of this kind of self-torture. Have I achieved enough? Am I a failure? Am I a success?

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.

Golf was just what the Scottish character had been searching for for centuries. Namely, a method of self-torture disguised as a game, which could entrap irreligious youths into principles of what was to become first known as Calvinism and then … golf. The main tenets of this faith are that life is grim and uncomfortable and that human vanity cannot prevail.

When once the gate is opened to self-torture, the whole army of fiends files in.

if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you're absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others. Since this ideal is an impossibility, you can never live up to it. You are merely in love with this ideal, and there is no end to the self-torture, to the self-nagging, self-castigating. It hides under the mask of "self-improvement." It never works.

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.

What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all mans 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 Gods sanctity

I wish that I could leave myself alone. I wish that I could finally feel that I punished myself enough. That I deserved time off for all my bad behaviour. Let myself off the hook, drag myself off the rack where I am both torturer and torturee.

Very frequently, feminine activity also expresses itself in what is largely a retrospectively oriented pondering over what we ought to have done differently in life, and how we ought to have done it; or, as if under compulsion, we make up strings of causal connections. We like to call this thinking; though, on the contrary, it is a form of mental activity that is strangely pointless and unproductive, a form that really leads only to self-torture.

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.

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 (...)

Mediaevalism, with its saints and martyrs, its love of self-torture, its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods—Mediaevalism is real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.  When the Renaissance dawned upon the world, and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living, men could not understand Christ. 

I suppose there must be idiots who dream of signing deals with publishers while fully intending to drink martinis in cool bars or ride around on skateboards. But the actual writers I know are experts in neurotic self-torture. Every page of writing is the result of a thousand tiny decisions and desperate acts of will.

We have allowed others to program us with methods of self-torture, and we can see that we have retaliated by inviting others to torture themselves in return. We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by guilt, and we turn it around and use that same mechanism of guilt to try to exploit and control others.

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.

How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?" Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we've genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

The longing for peace has essentially come from troubled minds, minds that are torturing themselves. For them, peace is a big commodity that they have to seek. If you are not using your mind for self-torture, why would you think of peace? Would you seek the exuberance of life or would you seek peace? Only if you have become an expert in self-torture, peace seems to be the greatest thing.

Better the self-torture of a godless Protestant conscience than the fantasies of a modern Prometheus.