"Self-torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Mahayana is that everyone should strive for the happiness and salvation of all beings, but this beautiful truth may be sadly perverted if it is held that the endurance of pain is in itself meritorious and that such acquired merit can be transferred to others. Self-torture, seems not to be unknown in the popular forms ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... have undergone 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
... can I 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 ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... profoundly. Dimly he guessed that the stricken soul before him had formed the erroneous idea that he, Errington, had come to do some great wrong to Thelma or her belongings, and he pitied the poor creature for his foolish self-torture. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... of life which Suso accepts in all the severity of its literal meaning. The story of the terrible penances which he inflicted on himself for part of his life is painful and almost repulsive to read; but they have nothing in common with the ostentatious self-torture of the fakir. Suso's deeply affectionate and poetical temperament, with its strong human loves and sympathies, made the life of the cloister very difficult for him. He accepted it as the highest life, and strove to conform himself ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Cal felt a pity at the uselessness of the self-torture, the senseless need of man to punish himself for the guilt of imagined wrongs; and felt a wonder if the strangely developed moral sense of man had not, after all, done more harm than good. For in the ordered universe, where everything fitted into the ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affections, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero, and the lives of Socrates and Cato." (Lecky: ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... now classify the evils actually produced. Religion injures individuals by prescribing useless and painful practices: fasting, celibacy, voluntary self-torture, and so forth. It suggests vague terrors which often drive the victim to insanity, and it causes remorse for harmless enjoyments.[621] Religion injures society by creating antipathies against unbelievers, and in a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... gift was valued at what it cost the giver, and was supposed to be efficacious in this same ratio, self-denial soon passed into self-torture, prolonged fasts, scourging and lacerations, thus becoming legitimate exhibitions of religious fervor. As mental pain is as keen as bodily pain, the suffering of Jephthah was quite as severe as that of the Flagellants, ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton |
