Masochistic Quotes & Sayings

There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father. — Alexander Lowen

I think I've still got a bit of a sado-masochistic streak in me, because if I'm not going to be restricted by corsets and covered in lace, then I still wind up wearing an ape-mask over my face. I do wonder how I get myself in these situations! — Helena Bonham Carter

Those who delight in bad movies and enjoy producing their own unfilmed versions of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may gain a measure of semi-masochistic enjoyment out of Van Helsing . There are quite a few unintentionally funny moments, although the overall experience was too intensely painful for me to be able to advocate it as being so bad, it's good. — James Berardinelli

However objective one's analytical approach may seem, [Some dude] argues, we must recognize the myth of objectivity as another rhetoric, another metadiscourse fashioning our sense of 'reality.' Although avant-gardism has long been believed to be a metafictional rhetoric displacing reality, we must not forget that it is a framework of reality that has been constructed rhetorically--whether its rhetoric is ontological or consumerist or creative-masochistic. — Takayuki Tatsumi

Sweetheart, insulting the spirits won't win them over. Most astrals aren't as masochistic as I am. - William Maddox — Jennifer DeLucy

Of course, the hustler doesn't proclaim his trade to the outside world, for typically he has neither a masochistic urge to be put down nor the reactive hostility to majority opinion that one finds in the flamboyant homosexual or "professional Negro" or "professional Jew" and the like. — Ned Polsky

I love sex ... It should be animalistic, it should be sadistic, it should at times be masochistic ... There are few rules and moral conventions. — Jayne Mansfield

I wasn't ready to leave. Some masochistic shred of my being didn't want to walk away from him yet, even though staying defied logic and common sense. — Pepper Winters

All of my roles have had their own unique set of challenges, and I enjoy that in some perverse, masochistic way. I'm always dying though! Maybe I have some kind of fetish. — Jared Leto

To suffer unecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic. — Viktor E. Frankl

I'm not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I'm told it should be good for me, I'll put it down. That said, most of what I read would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable. — Josh Radnor

And so the lion fell in love with the lamb ... " he murmured. I looked away, hiding my eyes as I thrilled to the word.
"What a stupid lamb," I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion. — Stephenie Meyer

Self-mortification, far from producing liberation from material things, is far more likely to cause either an unhinged mind, delusions or a masochistic taste for more suffering, experienced, of course, as joy. — Idries Shah

Every time I open the drawer, it's a trip down Memory Lane, which, if you don't turn off at the right exit, merges straight into the Masochistic Nostalgia Highway. — Sloane Crosley

I was many things. I was submissive. I was masochistic. I was trusting. I was a sexual slave. But obedient? Not as much. — C.D. Reiss

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

Poisonous people do not deserve your time. To think otherwise is masochistic. — Timothy Ferriss

The only way to be a champion is by going through these forced reps and the torture and pain. That's way I call it the torture routine. Because it's like forced torture. Torturing my body. What helps me is to think of this pain as pleasure. Pain makes me grow. Growing is what I want. Therefore, for me pain is pleasure. And so when I am experiencing pain I'm in heaven. It's great. People suggest this is masochistic. But they're wrong. I like pain for a particular reason. I don't like needle's stuck in my arm. But I do like the pain that is necessary to be a champion. — Arnold Schwarzenegger

Why do people even take photographs, anyway? They're just reminders of what once was and what you'll never get back. It's so masochistic.-Dom — Daria Snadowsky

I was a self-centered bore. I was masochistic, and only thought I was happy. When I woke up and said, "there must be something wrong with me", I grew up. Because I never understood myself, how could I hope to understand anyone else? That's why I can truly say that now I can give a woman love for the first time in my life, because I can understand her. — Cary Grant

Whipping, caning, chains, restraints, the cat-o'-nine tails and many other devices beloved of the Marquis de Sade are employed in more extreme sado-masochistic relationships. A spanking, though, s every girl knows, is more about pleasure than pain. — Chloe Thurlow

If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose a rescuer doesn't come? — Joanna Russ

For those with drive, wit, vision, ego and a masochistic outlook, there is always room. — K Callan

In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love
a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital and thus inevitably thwarted, illicit, adulterous. One of the medieval terms for it was amour honestus (honest love). I've always wondered why this passionate ideal
masochistic, spiritual-travelled with such wildfire throughout Europe. My poem, a ghazal, takes up the subject. — Edward Hirsch

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

When it comes to love, I realize that I am masochistic. They might consider me crazy for loving you despite everything that we have been through. You may not be worth the pain, but if it's from you, I really don't mind the devastation. I don't want to ever let you go. I may deserve better than you, but you're just the same, aren't you? You are me. There is no difference. Tomorrow I will feel the same as I did the day before. You are the only one I could love this way, and that's not something I ever want to give up. — Jennifer Megan Varnadore

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure. — Edmund White

And then, for some masochistic and stupid reason, we had sex again. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like — Shirley Jackson

But when I lose my temper, I find it difficult to forgive myself. I feel I've failed. I can be calm in a crisis, in the face of death or things that hurt badly. I don't get hysterical, which may be masochistic of me. — Emma Thompson

At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one's sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire's Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife - that is our absolute, our eternity. — Emil Cioran

I have a great editor and I enjoy, in a masochistic way, being ruthless about my own performance. There's an initial point in the editing, if you're directing yourself, especially in my case, where you go, "Ouch, ouch, ouch, I can't watch this." And then, there's a point where you become hard-nosed and just take your neurosis away and go, "What's working? That's okay. That's okay. We can lose that, and lose that." You get objective about it. — Ralph Fiennes

Frequently, and not only in the popular usage, sadomasochism is confounded with
love. Masochistic phenomena, especially, are looked upon as expressions of love.
An attitude of complete self-denial for the sake of another person and the
surrender of one's own rights and claims to another person have been praised as
examples of "great love". It seems that there is no better proof for "love" than
sacrifice and the readiness to give oneself up for the sake of the beloved person.
Actually, in these cases, "love" is essentially a masochistic yearning and rooted in the symbiotic need of the person involved. — Erich Fromm

People think I take some sort of masochistic pleasure out of putting out music that's gonna be unpopular. — Billy Corgan

The thrill of terror is passive, masochistic, and implicitly feminine. It is imaginative submission to overwhelming superior force. — Camille Paglia

Like some crazed masochistic yo-yo — Melina Marchetta

Along with our passivity, we're entering a profoundly masochistic phase everyone is a victim these days, of parents, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, even love itself. And how much we enjoy it. Our happiest moments are spent trying to think up new varieties of victimhood ... — J.G. Ballard

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

I can just imagine the recruiting poster. 'Ghost whisperers wanted: no experience necessary. Death wish and masochistic tendencies a must. — Mary Lindsey

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

How much of the audience's fun was sacrificed in the effort to redefine the social parameters of the concert hall - it sounds almost masochistic of the upper crust, curtailing their own liveliness, but I guess they had their priorities. Although the quietest — David Byrne

The common element in both submission and domination is the symbiotic nature of relatedness. Both persons involved have lost their integrity and freedom; they live on each other and from each other, satisfying their craving for closeness, yet suffering from the lack of inner strength and self-reliance which would require freedom and independence, and furthermore constantly threatened by the conscious or unconscious hostility which is bound to arise from the symbiotic relationship.10 The realization of the submissive (masochistic) or the domineering (sadistic) passion never leads to satisfaction. — Erich Fromm

His blood rushed through his veins like lava as his cock turned rock hard. "Get a hold of yourself. You're not some horny teen chasing after the first girl who smiled at you."
True, but there was something about this woman. Something that put a slow burn in his blood.
Yeah, she wants to beat your ass, you masochistic bastard.
-Syn — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I started out in stand-up when I was 18, which is really masochistic, and I did it really till I started going in movies. I did it for about three years out in LA. — Debra Winger

I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end. — Gavin Maxwell

Acceptance doesn't mean masochistic pessimism, but joyful support of and participation in the great cosmic drama. — Nathan J. Johnson

I poured myself another glass of wine (white, now warm and disgusting, but I was in a masochistic mood) — Linda Gillard

The important thing is not to be masochistic. Women are so hard on themselves. Don't do that. No one is keeping score. — Simon Doonan

We as human beings are slightly masochistic. Everybody is ridden with insecurities and they manifest themselves in different ways, whether you're a pleaser, you're mean, you're super-duper sweet and get walked on, or you're a gossip that talks about someone else. — Kristen Bell

Edward: So the lion fell in love with the lamb.
Bella:What a stupid lamb.
Edward:What a sick masochistic lion. — Stephanie Meyer

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

I want to be stereotyped. I want to be classified. I want to be a clone. I want to be masochistic. I want to be sadistic. I want a Suburban Home. I don't want no hipppie pad; I want a house just like Mom and Dad. — Milo Aukerman

Golfers have a tendency to be very masochistic. They like to punish themselves for some reason. A lot of them like tough courses. — Jack Nicklaus

Instead of Gnostics, we have Existentialists and God-is-dead theologians, instead of Neo-Platonists, devotees of Zen, instead of desert hermits, heroin addicts and Beats (who also, oddly enough, seem averse to washing), instead of mortification of the flesh, sado-masochistic pornography; as for our public entertainments, the fare offered by television is still a shade less brutal than that provided by the Amphitheatre, but only a shade and may not be so for long. — W. H. Auden

Any decent politician is masochistic enough to dream now and then of going down in flames while the angels sing. — Isaac Asimov

I feel like I am floating in plasma
I need a teacher or a lover
I need someone to risk being involved with me.
I am so vain
and I am so masochistic.
How can they coexist? — Francesca Woodman

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

I never took the bus. Never. Walking meant you were eccentric or pious or a loser - riding the bus meant you were insane or masochistic and worse than a loser. — Susan Straight

Unnecessary suffering is masochistic rather than heroic. — Viktor E. Frankl

I admire when people take the harder path, not because they are masochistic and want to beat themselves up, but because you actually kind of learn more and I think you grow more. — Josh Hartnett

-- I'm wary of all morning people. There is something unsettling about a person who likes to leave the comforts of a warm bed and soft pillow. Absolutely masochistic. — K.T. Mara

I'm starting to think it was a mistake to introduce you to the whole gang," he said.
Rafe was still hitting on Layla; Layla was fighting with him, insisting that fairies didn't turn good people into monsters, they just exposed the monstrousness that was already there; and Freddie was doing his best to play peacemaker, or etiquette coach from 1850, or whatever he thought he was doing. Henley was watching the group from outside, leaning against the window, smoking a cigarette. Viv was sawing into an apple tart with a masochistic grin on her face.
"No wonder you're such a freak," Mira said finally. — Sarah Cross

There is no God and we are his inventors. Humanity designed him like some sinister masochistic architects. The infinite blueprint for our intellectual enslavement. — C.J. Anderson

The most pernicious message relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually "normal," while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex
and violence are interchangeable; it widens the range of behavior considered
acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse-behavior which reiteratively
strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential, including the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutuality and integrity. — Adrienne Rich

Do you not comprehend this in America, how your unions have been all but destroyed in the last 30 years? Do you not understand why your local US Postal Service offices are cracked, neglected, and almost derelict buildings, with their staffs downsizing and limiting their days of service? The corporately owned US Congress is destroying the postal service as part of its act, playing you for a fool while wearing a two-party (two-headed) monster mask. One sadistic party acts as a wrecking ball hurled at a wall of political inertia that is the second and masochistic party. — John Hogue

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

It seems that it is only in the United States that an almost masochistic attack on the position of its own oil companies exists. — John J. McCloy

Over the course of seventy years, Isobel had learned how indiscriminately unkind Life could be. She also knew that cataloguing and reviewing examples of such cruelty was, in itself, a masochistic exercise. One that she'd habitually and rigorously trained herself to refrain from engaging in. Better to focus on those events that demonstrated the grace and beauty with which Life could perform, without rival, when bestowing on her captive audience a distinctively intermittent yet consistently welcomed generosity of spirit. — Ella J. Fraser

To limit yourself to a label of "alcoholic" is masochistic and false if you have awakened a deeper spiritual identity within and have come to know your true self as unconditioned pure awareness. This doesn't mean that recovering alcoholics don't have to be concerned with relapsing, they must always remain vigilant. The power of addiction should not be underestimated. This exercise in vigilance can become a spiritual tool of liberation as well. Always being aware of choosing between real happiness and false happiness is also the discrimination required to attain enlightenment. — Deepak Chopra

I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province. — Anthony Bourdain

The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that which they both have in common: fusion without integrity . — Erich Fromm

You could kill me, Alice, he looked at me seriously. That's how much you mean to me. As foolish and masochistic as that makes me, you are so much to me that even if it destroys me to be with you, I'll be with you! — Amanda Hocking

One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human. — James Pratt

To decide to film a movie again shot by shot, you must be masochistic to a certain degree because it is a much greater challenge. — Michael Haneke

Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult. — Laurence Olivier

This might sound masochistic or narcissistic, I don't know, but when I'm not playing the game, the validations I feel about life are always through the hardships. I relate more to sadness, in a lot of ways, when I'm not playing. — Abby Wambach

The dentist swiveled on his heels and disappeared, leaving me there to massage my jaw back into feeling after its brief, masochistic marriage to the top of my wooden desk. — Jonathan Lethem