"Self-torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... do?' and spoke as a man who felt that he was deprived of all the means of accomplishing good; and yet you have, with but little effort, lifted a human soul out of the dark valley of ignorance, where it was groping ill self-torture, and placed it on an ascending mountain path. The light of hope has fallen, through your aid, with sunny warmth upon a heart that was cold and barren a little while ago, but is now green with verdure, and blossoming in the sweet promise of fruit. The infinite years to come ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... superstition, and wildly propounds queries of a far different character—queries whose solution he has passionately at heart—propounds them half in superstition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture—propounds them not altogether because he believes in the prophetic or demoniac character of the bird (which reason assures him is merely repeating a lesson learned by rote), but because he experiences a frenzied pleasure in so modelling ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... nice as things. Humanity was no more than an ugly parasite infesting the earth. The vile quality of men and women could hardly be exaggerated. There was Miss Coates, the secretary of the Anti-Suffrage Society, who had come to this meeting from some obscure motive of self-torture and sat quite close by, jerking her pale face about in the shadow of a wide, expensive hat (it was always women like that, Ellen acidly remarked, who could afford good clothes) as she was seized by convulsions of contempt for the speaker and the audience. Ellen ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... right side) and some observances of the ascetics (such as pulling out the hair instead of shaving the head) are severe, but as a community the Jains lead sane and serious lives, hardly practising and certainly not parading the extravagances of self-torture which they theoretically commend. Mahavira is said to have taught that place, time and occasion should be taken into consideration and his successors adapted their precepts to the age in which they lived. Such monks as I have met[285] maintained that extreme forms of tapas were ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... 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
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