Self Torment Quotes

Find one thing. One thing that's beautiful. Anything. Anything that shows you you're not one of them."

His eyes were back on me studying my face silently. Panic raced through me. It wasn't working. I couldn't do this. We were going to have to get out of here, regardless of whatever state he was in. I knew he'd leave, too. If i had learned anything, it was that Dimitri's warrior instincts were still working. If I said danger was coming, he would respond instantly, no matter the self-torment he felt. I didn't want him to leave in despair. I wanted him to leave here one step closer to being the man I knew he could be. I wanted him to have one less nightmare.

It was beyond my abilities, though. I was no therapist. I was about to tell him we had to get out of there, about to make his soldier reflexes kick in, when he suddenly spoke. His voice was barley a whisper. "Your hair."

"What?" for a second, I wondered if it was on fire or somthing. I touched a stray lock. No, nothing was wrong exept that it was a mess. I'd bound it up for battle to prevent the strgoi from using it as a handhold, like Angeline had. Much of it had come undone in the struggle, though.

"Your hair," repeated Dimitri. His eyes were wide, almost awestruck. "your hair is beautiful. ~ Richelle Mead

The self-conscious feedback mechanism of the cortex allows us the hallucination that we are two souls in one body -a rational soul and an animal soul, a rider and a horse, a good guy with better instincts and finer feelings and a rascal with rapacious lusts and untruly passions. Hence the marvelously involved hypocrisies of guilt and penitence, and the frightful cruelties of punishment, warfare, and even self-torment in the name of taking the side of the good soul against the evil. The more it sides with itself, the more the good soul reveals its inseparable shadow, and the more it disowns its shadow, the more it becomes it. ~ Alan W. Watts

The temptation is always there: to punish oneself. To make oneself miserable. ~ Marty Rubin

When a child is lost there is no end to the self-torment a parent may inflict. When we love, and the object of our love is small, weak, and vulnerable, and has looked to us and us alone for protection; and when such protection, for whatever reason, has failed, what consolation (what justification, what defense) may there possibly be? ~ George Saunders

We put ourselves through hell and that is hell. ~ Marty Rubin

Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me! ~ Fernando Pessoa

Those who refuse to drink are always thirsty. ~ Marty Rubin

All the seven deadly sins are self destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, averice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape. ~ Angus Wilson

This Irish war, small as it may seem now, will, if it is persisted in, corrupt and eventually ruin not only your army, but your Empire itself. What right has England to torment and demoralise Ireland? ~ Erskine Childers

And don't succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord's torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.'
'Master!' I said, shocked.
'So it is, Adso. And there are ever richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, amazed. Then, siezed by doubt, I added, 'But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!'
'The other skull must be in another treasury,' William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. ~ Umberto Eco

You took me to Heaven and put me through Hell. And I'd go back and do it all again. ~ Kate McGahan

Some of your griefs you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you've endured
From evils that never arrived. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reality (i.e., the truth) is that there is a God in heaven. Reality is that He made us and we are accountable to Him. Reality is that this God has spoken and what He says matters
eternally. Reality is that without His salvation, we are doomed to eternal torment. Reality is that God's Son, Jesus Christ, has died for the sins of the world, that He has risen again, and that whoever believes on Him is given eternal life. ~ Jim Berg

Existence = Torment. The equation seems obvious to me, but not to one of my friends. How to convince him? I cannot lend him my sensations; yet only they would have the power to persuade him, to give him that additional dose of ill-being he has so insistently asked for all this time. ~ Emil M. Cioran

Life never stops. The torment of men will be eternal, unless the function of creating and acting and changing, living intensely through each day, be considered an eternal joy. ~ Le Corbusier

The more estimable the offender, the greater the torment. ~ Voltaire

I'm not going to be gentle, because we both know you don't want gentle. I'm going to torment you until you're stiff and aching - until even the whisper of my breath on your skin makes you moan. ~ Samanthe Beck

The rapid pulse in her wrist vibrated against his lips. His own rhythm matching the jumps in her heartbeat. He closed his eyes, breathed in her sweet scent one last time, and looked down into her eyes. She stared back at him, boldly assessing. God help him. He could not seduce her. He could not live with himself if he did. Expecting her to remove her hand, he closed his eyes again and sighed softly, willing his body to relax. Her hand slowly left his face. This is for the best. His heart and body ached at the loss and the unfulfillment of his desires. The next instant, her gentle hand stroked his chin and bottom lip and his whole body jerked. He kept his eyes closed, afraid to break the spell. Warm fingers slid down his neck. Shivers coursed up and down his spine. Sweet was the torment and fragile was his control as he felt it slip away. ~ Angela Quarles

I think if Eternity held torment, its form would not be fiery rack, nor its nature, despair. I think that on a certain day amongst those days which never dawned, and will not set, an angel entered Hades - stood, shone, smiled, delivered a prophecy of conditional pardon, kindled a doubtful hope of bliss to come, not now, but at a day and hour unlooked for, revealed in his own glory and grandeur the height and compass of his promise: spoke thus - then towering, became a star, and vanished into his own Heaven. His legacy was suspense - a worse boon than despair. ~ Charlotte Bronte

I only wanted books - nothing more - only books, only words, it was never anything but words - give them to me, I don't have any! Look, see, I don't have any! Look, I'm naked, barefoot, I'm standing before you - nothing in my pants pockets, nothing under my shirt or under my arm! They're not stuck in my beard! Inside - look - there aren't any inside either - everything's been turned inside out, there's nothing there! Only guts! I'm hungry! I'm tormented!...
What do you mean there's nothing? Then how can you talk and cry, what words are you frightened with, which ones do you call out in your sleep? Don't nighttime cries roam inside you, a thudding twilight murmur, a fresh morning shriek? There they are words - don't you recognize them? They're writhing inside you, trying to get out! There they are! They're yours! From wood, stone, roots, growing in strength, a dull mooing and whining in the gut is trying to get out; a piece of tongue curls, the torn nostrils swell in torment. That's how the bewitched, beaten, and twisted snuffle with a mangy wail, their boiled white eyes locked up in closets, their vein torn out, backbone gnawed; that's right, that's how your pushkin writhe, or mushkin - what is in my name for you? - pushkin-mushkin, flung upon the hillock like a shaggy black idol, forever flattened by fences, up to his ears in di, the pushkin-stump, legless, six-fingered, biting his tongue, nose in his chest - and his head can't be raised! - pushkin, tearing off the pois ~ Tatyana Tolstaya

For an immeasurable period of time, hours, days, weeks, it seemed, Celia had been struggling against tides of anguish, sinking deeper and deeper into a dreadful sea, whose waves broke at ever shorter intervals until at last there was no respite, but an endless torment that drowned and broke and shattered her to nothing. There was no longer any such person as Celia Bryant in the living world. All that remained was an anonymous hulk, a bleeding rag of flesh in a universe of pain. Her brain had long ago ceased to function. Only somewhere, at the centre of torture, an inexorable core of consciousness persisted.

Hours ago, years ago, she had thought: 'This is too much. No one could bear such agony and go on living.' It seemed that something in her must break; that she must either die or fall into oblivion. Yet somehow she had gone on bearing everything. She had not died. She had not lost consciousness. All that she had lost was the sense of her personal integrity. As a human being she was obliterated; her mind was dispersed. she could not any longer envisage an end of torment. 'Not only not to hope:not even to wait. Just to endure.'

At last, in some region utterly remote, a new thing came into being, words were spoken, and strangely, incredibly, the words had significance. That which had once been Celia could not grasp their meaning because somewhere else a woman's voice was crying out lamentably. Nevertheless, she heard a man speaking, and with a new sea ~ Anna Kavan

While within the sphere of real life, which not only has its rights, but itself imposes great obligations - within this sphere, if we wish to be humane, to be Christians finally, it is our duty and obligation to foster only those convictions that are justified by reason and experience, that have passed through the crucible of analysis, in a word, to act sensibly and not senselessly as in dreams or delirium, so as not to bring harm to a man, so as not to torment and ruin a man. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Exactly. You know what it says in the Book of Job." "Remind me." "Well, Satan is there in heaven, with God. God says, where have you been? And Satan says, roaming around the earth! It's a regular conversation. And they begin arguing about Job. Satan believes Job's goodness is founded entirely upon his good fortune. And God agrees to let Satan torment Job. This is the most nearly true picture of the situation which we possess. God doesn't know everything. The Devil is a good friend of his. And the whole thing is an experiment. And this Satan is a far cry from being the Devil as we know him now, worldwide." "You're really speaking of these ideas as if they were real beings ... ~ Anne Rice

Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less. ~ Franz Kafka

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. ~ Gary Wolf

Only one thing matters: live a good, happy life. Do your heart's bidding, even when it leads you on paths that timid souls would avoid. Even when life is a torment, don't let it harden you. ~ Wilhelm Reich

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment. ~ Jane Austen

Real love brings about calm - not inner torment. True love allows you to be at peace with yourself and with God. That is why Allah says: "that you may dwell in tranquility." Hawa is the opposite. Hawa will make you miserable. And just like a drug, you will crave it always, but never be satisfied. You will chase it to your own detriment, but never reach it. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

The day here is a something without value, a mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance. ~ Tayeb Salih

Our laugh is a torment and our cry is a joy for the Satan! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Torturous screams bounced around in his head, whimpers and cries of pain and lust clouding his mind, overbearing and foreboding. Sinning surrounded him, suffocating him, imprisoning him like a straightjacket. He tried to drive the noise away, to force it back and focus on something else, but the ruckus never stopped, never let up. It hindered his connection to the world outside the gates, muffling everything else to mere background noise. Blah, blah, motherfucking blah. This was his Hell: the inescapable torment he endured all alone. He craved silence but was awarded chaos. Instead of light and vitality, he existed in utter darkness. His Archangel nature helped him take it all in stride, but it was never easy, even for the one the world saw as the enemy. Satan ~ J.M. Darhower

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

The thinking (person) must oppose all cruel customs, no matter how deeply rooted in tradition and surrounded by a halo. When we have a choice, we must avoid bringing torment and injury into the life of another. ~ Albert Schweitzer

Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torment, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? ~ William James

Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call. ~ Ingmar Bergman

Everything gives way before the recurring torment and festivity of passion. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I am sure that deep down Ikhmenev was in a state of turmoil and pain as he witnessed the tears and torment of his poor wife; I am sure it was more agonizing for him than for her - but he could not control himself. This is what happens sometimes even with the most kind-hearted of people, who are nevertheless weak-willed, and who, despite their kind-heartedness, are apt to get carried off into a state of ecstasy when unburdening themselves of their grief and anger, even at the expense of hurting someone innocent, more often than not someone who is dear to them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The dove descending breaks the air With flame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre- To be redeemed from fire by fire. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. ~ T. S. Eliot

What are the heights, and depths, and lengths, of human science, with all the boasted acquisitions of the brightest genius of mankind! Learning and science can measure the globe, can sound the depths of the sea, can compass the heavens, can mete out the distances of the sun and moon, and mark out the path of every twinkling star for many ages past, or ages to come; but they cannot acquaint us with the way of salvation from this long, this endless distress. What are all the sublime reasonings of philosophers upon the abstruse and most difficult subjects? What is the whole circle of sciences which human wit and thought can trace out and comprehend? Can they deliver us from the guilt of one sin? Can they free us from one of the terrors of the Almighty? Can they assuage the torment of a wounded spirit, or guard us from the impressions of divine indignation? Alas, they are all but trifles in comparison of this blessed Gospel, which saves us from eternal anguish and death.

It is the Gospel that teaches us the holy skill to prevent this worm of conscience from gnawing the soul, and instructs us how to kill it in the seed and first springs of it, to mortify the corruptions of the heart, to resist the temptations of Satan, and where to wash away the guilt of sin. It is this blessed Gospel that clearly discovers to us how we may guard against the fire of divine wrath, or rather how to secure our souls from becoming the fuel of it. It is this Book that teaches us to sprinkle ~ Isaac Watts

The fault in suffering such torment is his, for his heart's boundless capacity to love was given so that he might direct it toward One possessing an infinite undying beauty. By misusing it and spending it on transitory beings, he has done wrong and suffers the punishment for his fault through the pain of separation. ~ Bediuzzaman Said Nursi

Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks. ~ Julio Cortazar

Not an exact quote, more like an opinion, a thought. Dementors suck out happiness from people. The make people remember their worst moments in life. The way to defeat them / repel them is to cast a patronus charm, [incantation: expecto patronum. If my latin serves me right it means "I expect / I command my patron].
The difficulty lies in casting the charm while those foul creatures make you feel terrible and the charm only works if you can conjure up a most happy memory.
I suggest a new / additional interpretation of JK Rowling's idea:
Demen - tors are your inner demons that make you feel terrible, things you did in your life, terrible losses you experienced (Harry hears his mother's screams) and negative emotions.
Those inner demons TORment you and your soul. You can only escape those horrible impressions with an overwhelming positive force of imagination. Happy moments in your life, thoughts about friends, family, love and connection versus the horrible loneliness that your inner demons create. ~ ThomThor

I will miss myself in relation to others. The rareness. The exceptional differences. I will miss the gift that comes with hardship and paying the price. I will miss the tragedy of my own life. As I once spoke...emphatically, but I now repeat here, quietly - the pain, the pain is what made it so God damn beautiful. I endured. You can wait a lifetime for thirty seconds, five minutes, or for an hour to come into your life - a brief interval that makes all the suffering purposeful. In such moments of splendor and rapture - even if the rapture be stilled, the private hours and years of reckoning are unloaded, a burden lifted and the spirit feels as it did on the happiest day of its life when it was young and untormented Or rather, unconscious of the torment waiting to be ignited. ~ Wheston Chancellor Grove

She was left to beg for mercy only to burn in torment again the next day. She was a weed struggling through cracks of concrete, unwanted, undesired, crushed and abused under trampling feet. She would never see the sun. She would never be free. She would always be a solitary candle in the dark, cold without a flame to warm it, forever peering out at the world through a laminated sheet of glass too thick to penetrate. When she died, if she was ever allowed, no one would ever know. She would pass a faded ghost of a girl abandoned by all. ~ Airicka Phoenix

Krampus found me, forced me into servitude - me, the son of Odin, a slave to a low-cast demon. I did not care, did not feel. Hollow of heart and soul, I came to believe this to be my fate, my penance, that I had been spared to bear torment not just for my own vanity and arrogance, but for that of all my forebears. ~ Brom

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words. ~ Jane Austen

You don't deserve to end up in a place of eternal torment because you love someone else. ~ Elora Bishop

She'd expected some backlash; it happened every time she shared her strength. But she hadn't anticipated so much raw anguish from Nico di Angelo ... If this was only a portion of Nico's pain ... how could he bear it? ~ Rick Riordan

If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The devil was smaller and rather younger than I would have guessed. He danced barefoot around the fire as he stoked it in preparation for my torment. The fiend wore a tunic of rough linen, leaves and sticks clinging to it, and a bycocket hat with a single feather in the style of bow hunters back home in Blighty. Bit of a ginger fringe. Scrawny and pathetic, really, for the prince of bloody darkness. ~ Christopher Moore

This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.
Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: 'Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.' Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible. ~ Sam Harris

You men have none of you any hearts.'
'If we have not hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough. ~ Jane Austen

We are told what steps our church will have to take to cross the line that Israel crossed. If our church were to adopt, openly and officially, the errors of Sunday sacredness, the immortality of the soul, and eternal torment, then we too would become a part of fallen Babylon. (See Selected Messages, vol. 2, p. 68 and Testimonies to Ministers, pp. 61, 62.) However, we must remember that small deviations from truth lead to larger errors. Our compromises over the last 50 years need to be addressed and reversed, or we could be in real danger of adopting the major errors of Babylon. ~ Dennis Priebe

She recognized that great love carries a price of great torment if it ends, but it also bestows a greater and more valuable gift. ~ Karen Ranney