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Quotes About Tormenting

Infinite are the mortifications of the bare attempt to emerge from obscurity; numberless the failures; and greater and more galling still the vicissitudes and tormenting accompaniments of success.
~ William Hazlitt
Wherever Christ is not, there is the Wrath of Nature or Nature left to itself and its own tormenting Strength of Life, to feel nothing in itself but the vain, restless Contrariety of its own working Properties.
~ William Law
From Jane Collier's "An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting" - In short, keep up in your mind the true spirit of contradiction to everything that is proposed or done; and although, from want of power, you may not be able to exercise tyranny, yet, by the help of perpetual mutiny, you may heavily torment and vex all there that love you; and be as troublesome as an impertinent fly, to those who care not three farthings about you.
~ Jane Collier
Rumor holds that Sabine trapped him to use as a sex slave, tormenting him until he agreed to wed her. Then he made a slave of her." She blinked at him. "Like those are bad things?" At his look of astonishment, she said, "They enjoyed tons of bondage, some master/sub stuff, a real-live dungeon with shackles, role and cosplay. Spankings and repeated orgasm denial. You know, typical BDSM. But don't worry, they were doing it before it became cool.
~ Kresley Cole
The nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her
~ Emily Bronte
I appealed to my mother. I told her it wasn't fair the way the whole family was invading my dreams and she said, Arrah, for the love o' God, drink your tea and go to school and stop tormenting us with your dreams.
~ Frank McCourt
Courtship is indeed a pleasing part of life when there is mutual affection, the consent of friends, the reasonable prospect of an eventual fulfillment, and when it is conducted in obedience to the will and worship of God. But when these concomitants are absent, what we call love becomes the most tormenting and destructive passion that can be named.
~ John Newton
Perhaps it is necessary to have been, like Nebuchadnezzar, something of a wild beast, and shut up in a cage at the Jardin des Plantes without other prey than the butcher's meat doled out by the keeper, or a retired merchant deprived of the joys of tormenting his clerks, to understand the impatience with which the brother and sister awaited the arrival of their cousin Lorrain.
~ balzac honore de iv
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, - though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!
~ Laurence Sterne
Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.
~ Montesquieu
as many of my readers, I hope, know what an exquisite delight there is in conveying pleasure to a beloved object, so some few, I am afraid, may have experienced the satisfaction of tormenting one we hate.
~ Henry Fielding
Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But the same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
~ Herman Melville
Life is full of tough decisions, and nothing makes them easy. But the worst ones are really your personal koans, and tormenting ambivalence is just the sense of satori rising. Try, trust, try, and trust again, and eventually you'll feel your mind change its focus to a new level of understanding.
~ Martha Beck
But I realized now that without quite thinking it through, I'd half-imagined myself a place here in the tower. My little room upstairs, a cheerful rummaging through the laboratory and the library, tormenting Sarkan like an untidy ghost who left his books out of place and threw his great doors open, and who made him come to the spring festival and stay long enough to dance once or twice.
~ Naomi Novik
She looked him full in the face with the most amazed expression. Even now he could not think of it without a shudder. And after a horribly long stare Alison had burst out laughing yes, laughing. She laughed so hard that she choked herself and someone had to beat her on the back. Finally she excused herself from the table. And all through that tormenting evening whenever he looked at her she gave him such a mocking smile.
~ Carson McCullers
But the man who is aware of his own unworthiness and the unworthiness of his brother is tempted with a subtler and more tormenting kind of hate: the general, searing, nauseating hate of everything and everyone, because everything is tainted with unworthiness, everything is unclean, everything is foul with sin.
~ Thomas Merton
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world - though the cant of hypocrites ihay be the worst - the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.
~ Laurence Sterne
Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, tho' the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, the cant of criticism is the most tormenting.
~ Laurence Sterne
Like tormenting love, some thoughts are so antifragile that you feed them by trying to get rid of them, turning them into obsessions. Psychologists have shown the irony of the process of thought control: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you.
~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I began absolutely non-stop tormenting my parents, begging them on a daily basis to move there.
~ Taylor Swift
Like such eclectic predecessors as Philip K. Dick, James Tiptree, Jr., Jorge Luis Borges, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, China Miéville, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Chiang has explored conventional tropes of science fiction in highly unconventional ways . . . Likely to linger in the memory the way riddles may linger—teasing, tormenting, illuminating, thrilling.' Joyce Carol Oates, New Yorker
~ Ted Chiang
I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
~ Jane Austen
If there were such a goddess in a book of olden tales, she would be the villain, tormenting the innocent from her high castle. The people of Weep were innocent—most of them—and she did torment them, but… what choice did she have?
~ Laini Taylor
Freedom was my first great desire. The second, which remains hidden within me to this day, tormenting me, was the desire for sanctity. Hero together with saint: such is mankind's supreme model.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis