Quotes & Sayings About Masochism

How long an actress lives professionally depends on her stamina, the extent of her masochism, her imagination, and her yearning for recognition or approval. — Lauren Bacall

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame. I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred. At most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live, and what's more, we continue to export it. — Michel Houellebecq

Perhaps that was his way of punishing himself. Masochism. People torture themselves more terribly than anyone else could. — Damon Suede

I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism. — Jeanne Moreau

The contempt shown him by Mardona still inflamed his passion, and that passion was nourished by the widespread respect that the Mother of God commanded and the blind obedience she inspired. And it seemed to Sabadil that from her emanated a light that surrounded her. To him, she appeared so beautiful, more beautiful than ever. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about 'the West,' to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. — Christopher Hitchens

When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. — Erich Fromm

And for that one moment of freedom you have to listen to all that love crap ... it drive me nuts sometimes ... I want to kick them out immediately ... I do now and then. But that doesn't keep them away. They like it, in fact. The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women ... they're all masochists at heart. — Henry Miller

No, it was too much. The line between madness and masochism was already hazy; the time had come to pull back ... to retire, hunker down, back off and "cop out," as it were. Why not? in every gig like this, there comes a time to either cut your losses or consolidate your winnings - whichever fits. — Hunter S. Thompson

Your ability to withstand pain is your claim to fame. It is ascetic, holy. It is self-control. It is masochism, and masochism pleasurable to many, but we don't like to think about that. We don't like to think that a person could have a twisted autoerotic life going on, be both a top and a bottom, and experience both at once: the pleasure of beating the hell out of a body shackled at the wrists, and the pleasure of being the body and knowing we deserve each blow. — Marya Hornbacher

It is interesting to note that in every phase of life feminine masochism finds some form of expression. — Helene Deutsch

You can raise welts like nobody else, as we dance to the Masochism Tango. — Tom Lehrer

Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share. — Andrei Codrescu

I'm not a notch on a belt."
"You could never be a notch, London Chantelle. You're the whole belt, sugar. — Elizabeth SaFleur

We're programmed for suffering, not joy. The masochism is built in at a very early age. You're supposed to work and suffer - and the trouble is: you believe it. — Erica Jong

Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury! — Jennifer Stone

There is probably an innate masochism in a lot of women that ends up disappointed if men don't ill-treat them. — Fay Weldon

Ana was a perpetual victim in a never-ending search for a victimizer. — Travis Luedke

Once it was the fashion to represent villages as places inhabited by laughable, livable simpletons, unspotted by the worldliness of city life, though occasionally shrewd in rural concerns. Later it was the popular thing to show villages as rotten with vice, and especially such sexual vice ... incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, and masochism were supposed to rage behind lace curtains and in the haylofts, while a rigid piety was professed in the streets. — Robertson Davies

- So you're a masochist.
- I know. But what's life rather than walking barefoot? — Cristian Peter Marinescu-Ivan

it is a pleasure, a kind of mild masochism, to have all the beautiful things belong to someone you love and none to yourself. — Fletcher Flora

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away. — Thomas Pynchon

Marathon: (noun)
A popular form of overpriced torture wherein participants wake up at ass-o-clock in the morning and stand in the freezing cold until it's time to run, at which point they miserably trot for a god-awful interval of time that could be better spent sleeping in and/or consuming large quantities of beer and cupcakes.
See also: masochism, awfulness, "a bunch of bullshit", boob-chafing, cupcake deprivation therapy — Matthew Inman

I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape. — Will Self

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism. — Cesare Pavese

So," Wanda cried, "a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery? — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Read from a distant star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled, arrogant creatures filled with a profound disgust with themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves as they possibly can out of pleasure in inflicting pain which is probably their only pleasure. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The institution of marriage should be re-examined because of its overwhelming claustrophobia. The odds are stacked against spontaneity and effervescence. It's an institution that was brought about for the sake of family and children, but biologically, it's very unnatural. It's masochism and torture the way it's been organized. — Peter Beard

Kids piercing themselves, piercing their tongues, what kind of masochism is that? Is it to show you can just take it? — Clint Eastwood

Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

When we begin to take responsibility for our multi-bio-dimensional inner nature ... when we begin to see AND understand both the angel and the devil within us, and endless other tendencies and qualities, from sexual capacity to artistic and intellectual potential, from sadism to masochism, from gentleness and tenderness to roughness and brutality, from heart to heartlessness, from selflessness to selfishness, from kindness to hatred - only then do we begin to manifest our human fullness. It is ONLY at that point, fully human, that we are capable of becoming something more ... as in metamorphosis ... something born within from the opposites. — Christopher Zzenn Loren

I locked the door and turned on the water to fill the tub. I made it so hot that I had to get in real slow. I wanted it to hurt; wanted my outside to feel as bad as my inside. I sat there a long time watching my skin turn redder and redder ... Finally my insides was as fiery as my skin. I liked the burn and hoped it took everything I'd been wishing for and turned it to ashes. — Susan Crandall

He soon recognized the fact that the stimulus proceeded from the idea to be in the power of a woman rather than from the act of violence itself. — Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages. — David Lodge

Reality is always separate from the ideal; but in Trinidad this fantasy is a form of masochism and is infinitely more cheating than the fantasy which makes the poor delight in films about rich or makes the English singer use and American accent. — V.S. Naipaul

Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment. — Jennifer Birkett

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street. — James Jones

Lesbians, homosexuals, masochism, sadism are not perversions. Actually, there are only two perversions: hockey on grass and ballet on ice. — Faina Ranevskaya

Freud wrote that love involves the undervaluation of reality and the overvaluation of the desired object. While the correct valuation of a person is an odd, if not impossible idea, we might say Freud meant something like this: for various reasons, many of them masochistic, we become involved with others who cannot possibly give what we ask for; we can wait as long as we wish, but they do not have it, and one day, if we bear to abandon our fantasy and see clearly, we might face reality straight on. We will then look elsewhere for fulfillment, to a place where our needs can, in fact, be satisfied. — Hanif Kureishi

The initial planting of seedlings at the start of a forestry study represents a weary victory, won by a stoic researcher with a strong sense of fatalism. This unique intellectual agony shapes the character of the tree experimentalist and selects for those with a religious devotion to science. Patient, with overtones of masochism. — Hope Jahren

A fourth argument, one that was made by Alexander Hamilton and continues to be repeated down to the present, is that free trade would be fine if all other countries practiced free trade but that so long as they do not, the United States cannot afford to. This argument has no validity whatsoever, either in principle or in practice. Other countries that impose restrictions on international trade do hurt us. But they also hurt themselves. Aside from the three cases just considered, if we impose restrictions in turn, we simply add to the harm to ourselves and also harm them as well. Competition in masochism and sadism is hardly a prescription for sensible international economic policy! Far from leading to a reduction in restrictions by other countries, this kind of retaliatory action simply leads to further restrictions. — Milton Friedman

And when he ran the blades over her she felt light as a feather, floating happily into that place where pain and pleasure walked hand in hand, fully clear and conscious and she looked out to the darkness that lay outside of their artificial day. All too soon it was gone, her vision dimming and her breaths evening as she found somewhere darker which centred around the golden light of her Master's voice as he spoke to her. — Astrid Knowles

Kindness is about energy we give and take from all creatures. The bottom line is the integrative interaction and the total interconnectedness between human beings, all creatures, and God. Kindness is a spirituality of solid truth, not shifting emotion; of justice, not occasional philanthropy; of genuine love, not sentimentality or masochism; of evolved adults, not fixated infants. — Jean Maalouf

You're used to difficult women. To struggle. Perhaps you like it when they give you a bad time." "Every treasure is guarded by dragons. That's how you can tell it's valuable. ... Do you mind if I unbutton my collar? It seems to be pressing on an artery. — Saul Bellow

Who am I to deny my Master pleasure, simply because it is not at the hands of myself? He is free to do as he will, because of the life that he has given me. I am thankful for him, for the fact that out of all of us, I am the one that he chooses to keep and care for as his own. — Astrid Knowles

The fascist authoritarianism, characterized by sado-masochism and destructiveness, had a function which is comparable psychologically to a neurotic symptom - namely, fascism compensated for powerlessness and individual isolation and protected the individual from anxiety-creating situations. If one compare fascism to a neurotic symptom, it can be said that fascism is a neurotic form of community. — Rollo May

Hagen turned his back to her. Who could blame him? Why he hadn't dropped her yet she didn't know. Masochism maybe? Heroism? Maybe he wanted to save her. Maybe he was too embarrassed to admit he couldn't. And — Tiffany Reisz

Every man's penis is the prettiest thing in the world to him. From the day he's born until the day he dies. It never loses its endless fascination. And, I kid you not, baby, the same is true of every woman and her pussy. It's the closest thing to a real, blind, helpless love and religious adoration that most people ever achieve. But they'd rather die than admit it. Homosexuality, the urge to kill, petty spites and treacheries, fantasies of sadism, masochism, transvestism, any weird thing you can name, they'll confess all that in a group therapy session. But that deep submerged constant narcissism, that perpetual mental masturbation, is the earliest and most powerful block. They'll never admit it. — Robert Shea

He wasn't fond of girls, especially curious ones; in his experience, they uually were demons in disguise. — Cameron Jace

Masochism seemed to make sense to me in terms of the struggle for self-consciousness of the slave in the struggle unto death.
'I feel like sex, I mean, giving myself, helps me. Giving my whole self to someone until I forget who I am helps me deal with my problems. — Tamara Faith Berger

As I see it, our revolutionary task is to destroy phallic identity in men and masochistic non-identity in women
that is, to destroy the polar realities of men and women as we now know them so that this division of human flesh into two camps
one an armed camp and the other a concentration camp
is no longer possible. Phallic identity is real and it must be destroyed. Female masochism is real and it must be destroyed. — Andrea Dworkin

I know a person who, though no poet, composed some verses in a very short time, which were full of feeling and admirably descriptive of her pain: they did not come from her understanding, but, in order the better to enjoy the bliss which came to her from such delectable pain, she complained of it to her God. She would have been so glad if she could have been cut to pieces, body and soul, to show what joy this pain caused her. What torments could have been set before her at such a time which she would not have found it delectable to endure for her Lord's sake? — Teresa Of Avila

She saw the shallow lines beaded with blood in her long mirror, and when he told her that she was beautiful, she believed him. — Astrid Knowles

My love is toxic and you're suicidal. — Ahmed Mostafa

It is true that often she doesn't want advice; she wants a listening ear. At the same time, however, the wise wife will realize her husband's desire to help and advise is strong. She should refrain from getting angry and humor him a bit, as one wife did by saying, "Thanks for the input. I know I am not the brightest bulb on the tree when it comes to certain things. I am glad we have each other. — Emerson Eggerichs

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence - the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers. — Robert Anton Wilson

I would let myself be taken until I was nothing more than his creation, a poetic body, the divine alternative to womankind. — Laura Elizabeth Woollett

I have also fantasised myself to be his female slave, but this does not suffice, for after all every woman can be the slave of her husband. — Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

To the "masculists" of both sexes, "femininity" implies all that men have built into the female image in the past few centuries: weakness, imbecility, dependence, masochism, unreliability, and a certain "babydoll" sexuality that is actually only a projection of male dreams. To the "feminist" of both sexes, femininity is synonymous with the eternal female principle, connoting strength, integrity, wisdom, justice, dependability, and a psychic power foreign and therefore dangerous to the plodding masculists of both sexes. — Elizabeth Gould Davis

The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite. — Clive Barker

And confessions of love have always seemed out of place when you're gasping for air, when you're begging for pain,
when you're missing something, unable to change the channel. — Kris Kidd

To suffer personally and directly due to the collective is not necessary, and is also a subtle form of masochism disguised as virtue. — Irma Kaye Sawyer

Hakeem: A wise man once said that suffering produces perseverance, character; and character, hope.
Andre: Since when did spouting masochism make one wise? And the sacraments of a bitter existence? Who deemed that a vaunted prize? Nihilistic philosophy only births more pain. It's fruitless to espouse folly, repackage it as wisdom, and spew it in a wise man's name. — Booker T. Mattison

That the idea of God represents the conscience, the internalized admonitions and threats from parents and educators, is a well-known fact. What is less well known is the fact that, from an energy point of view, the belief in and the fear of God are sexual excitations which have changed their content and goal. The religious feeling, then, is the same as sexual feeling, except that it is attached to mystical, psychic contents. This explains the return of the sexual element in so many ascetic experiences, such as the nun's delusion that she is the bride of Christ. Such experiences rarely reach the stage of genital consciousness and thus are apt to take place in other sexual channels, such as masochistic martyrdom. — Wilhelm Reich

For the first time she had dimly realized that only the hopeless are starkly sincere and that only the unhappy can either give or take sympathy
even some of the bitter and dangerous voluptuousness of misery. — Jean Rhys

If we mean by love the passionate affirmation and active relatedness to the esssence of a particular person, if we mean by it the union with another person on the basis of the independence and integrity of the two persons involved, then masochism and love are opposites. Love is based on equality and freedom. If it is based on subordination and loss of integrity of one partner, it is masochistic dependence regardless of how the relationship is rationalized. Sadism also appears frequently under the disguise of love. To rule over another person, if one can claim that to rule him is for that person's own sake, frequently appears as an expression of love, but the essential factor is the enjoyment of domination. — Erich Fromm

Running through an unfamiliar forest filled with thorns is half an exercise in masochism, and half an obstacle course from the deepest reaches of Hell. — Seanan McGuire

The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals. — Spiro T. Agnew

For me, it's not about masochism to talk about death. For me, it's about observing life through death, from the last point of it. — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism. — A.E. Samaan

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. — Jennifer Birkett

The mind, at times, takes masochistic delight in suffering. — Saurbh Katyal

The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack. — Jonathan Tropper

It was a kind of sado-masochism. I would take the things that were painful to me and elevate them and, through the mantra of music, make them into a release. — Michael Gira

Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism. — Diana Gabaldon

Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be. — Alain De Botton

Masochism is a valuable job skill. — Chuck Palahniuk

Sexual deviance, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, coprophagy, coprolalia, voyeurism - the list was endless. — Paulo Coelho

Ah, the superior masochism of the privileged. — Apostolos Doxiadis

If there wasn't a word for it, would we realize our masochism as much? — David Levithan

At this point, I was afraid to find out the answers to those questions, but that wouldn't stop me from trying. Masochism was legit. — Santino Hassell

I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Yeah. I can see what you bring out in him. You don't know this because you've never experienced it, but Four without you is a much different person. He's ... obsessive, explosive, insecure ... "
"Obsessive?"
"What else do you call someone who repeatedly goes through his own fear landscape?"
"I don't know ... determined." I pause. "Brave."
"Yeah, sure. But also a little bit crazy, right? I mean, most Dauntless would rather leap into the chasm than keep going through their fear landscapes. There's bravery and then there's masochism, and the line got a little hazy with him. — Veronica Roth

Pregnancy = "the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. — Julia Kristeva

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'. — Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

There are men who have themselves whipped simply to increase their sexual pleasure. These, in contrast with true masochists, regard flagellation as a means to an end. — Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

It amazes me to witness the masochism with which some journalists characterize their industry as a dying species. The future belongs to citizen journalism and blogs. — Mathias Dopfner

Masochism is a condition of perverted pain. — Stefan Boldisor

Then why are you still here?" I ask. I stand up and her gun follows me. I welcome its bullets just to see if I could survive.
"Masochism."
"I don't know what that means."
"It means I like my own pain."
"That doesn't make sense."
"I'm human. You think we ever make sense? — Tessa Maurer

In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs. — Chuck Palahniuk