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Masochism Quotes

Browse 77 quotes about Masochism.

Masochism Quotes

“If all pleasure has, preserved within it, earlier pain, then here pain, as pride in bearing it, is raised directly, untransformed, as a stereotype, to pleasure: unlike wine, each glass of whisky, each inhalation of cigar smoke, still recalls the repugnance that it cost the organism to become attuned to such strong stimuli, and this alone is registered as pleasure.”

PainPleasureMasculinityToxic MasculinityMasochism
Book:Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
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“One must seriously doubt the story that Prometheus did not expect the vulture. It is far more likely, according to modern psychology, that it was entirely for the purpose of being pecked in the liver that he stole the fire of heaven. He was a masochist; masochism, like eye coloring, is an inborn trait and nothing to be ashamed of; one should matter-of-factly indulge it and utilize it for the good of society.”

MythologyMasochismPrometheus
Book:A Perfect Vacuum
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“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.”

MythologyAsceticismMasochismMonastic Life
Book:A Time to Keep Silence
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“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”

WarDeathReligionCausesChristianityPrinciplesSacrificeChildhoodFriendsSuicideTorturePatriotismUglinessFanaticismNovemberSoldiersMartyrdomBoyhoodPoppiesTheocracyMasochismOrwellConscriptionSelf ImportanceMartyrsComradesMemorialsKamikazeSuicide AttackSelf AbnegationChristian Martyrs
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“And what is the value of this sexual object to men, since it is they who form her, use her, and give her what value she has? The pioneering male masochist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who spent most of his life bullying bewildered women into wearing furs and halfheartedly whipping him, candidly wrote in his diary that “my cruel ideal woman is for me simply the instrument by which I terrorise myself.” The nature of the act does not change the nature of the act: the female is the instrument; the male is the center of sensibility and power. Roland Barthes, with himself as the lover, essentially endorses the same view of the object’s value and purpose: “Enough that, in a flash, I should see the other in the guise of an inert object, like a kind of stuffed doll, for me to shift my desire from this annulled object to my desire itself; it is my desire I desire, and the loved being is no more than its tool.”

FeminismMasochism
Book:Pornography: men possessing women
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“Interestingly, forced feminization fantasies are also symbolic representations of our actual life experiences. Because we fi nd the prospect of becoming women so shameful and humiliating, we really do have to be forced into it. We are forced by our unremitting gender dysphoria, by our powerful erotic desires, by our love and admiration for women’s bodies and our wishes to turn our bodies into facsimiles of them, and by our need to honor our strongly held cross-gender identities in order to give meaning and vitality to our lives. If we are prudent, we autogynephilic transsexuals undergo sex reassignment only if we feel we have no other viable alternative: We transition because we feel forced to do so. Forced feminization is, in a very real sense, the story of our lives.”

BdsmMasochismTranssexualTranssexualismAutogynephilia
Book:Men Trapped in Men's Bodies
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“My body was quiet after the orgy. I felt power; I felt I was taking revenge. I was inflicting pain, being unfaithful, desecrating all the delicacies in Bill and in myself. Wilson, who has big needs, needed me, wanted all I could give, wanted me for a wife, a collaborator, a mistress, one to enjoy power with, his two houses, his position of power, his last ten years of achievement, but I starve him, elude him. He telephones. I inflict the suffering on him that was inflicted on me by another, but only because I do not love. So it must mean that those who behaved as I do now do not love.”

SadisticSadismMasochism
Book:Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin
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“One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.”

ChildrenWarReligionSufferingJesusChristianityAtheismBibleWinePunishmentJealousyArroganceSelf RespectHolocaustJudaismExileSecularismJerusalemMartyrdomSurvivorsGentilesMasochism1967Will Of GodFalse ModestyGrandmothersTheodicyHellenismPassoverRabbisPassover SederHiwi Al BalkhiSix Day WarBiblical CovenantDivine RetributionEdith SteinRationalisationWestern Wall
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“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.”

GodReligionDelusionMartyrdomAsceticismMasochismSexual ExcitementSexual Feelings
Book:The Mass Psychology of Fascism
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“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.”

MurderArtistsDecadenceMasochismDecadentConsumerDisempowermentVoyeurismSelf DisgustDiginty
Author:Jennifer Birkett
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“I know you not quite well Yet I foolishly surrender my mind to you. Slowly and carefully you have cast a spell Now my virgin heart only longs for you. There is no need to push, I am already falling. Once proudly tall, I’m no longer standing. Knowing well that I am doomed to misery, I will roll the dice and take delight in my suffering.”

MindHeartSufferingFallRelationshipStandingMiseryDelightFoolishSurrenderDoomMartyrBreak UpKnowLove PoemIn LoveLoseMartyrdomDiceFallingSufferMasochismVirginSpellPushExGame OverSeduceCastMasochistSeducedBewitchBeguileSelf ImposedLove MartyrOn Purpose
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“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.”

PainHurtFireCuttingBurnMasochism
Book:Whistling Past the Graveyard
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“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.”

MenDreamPastCertainSexJusticePrinciplesCenturyDangerousIntegrityEternalWeaknessBuiltFemaleMalesFeministSexualityDependencePsychicsFemininityProjectionMasochismImbecilityDependabilityUnreliability
Author:Elizabeth Gould Davis
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