"Self-torture" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Englishmen in the twentieth century something of the fullness that characterized the Elizabethans: but somehow or other our dramatists hesitate to cross that threshold. It cannot be that their powers are lacking: it can only be some timidity or self-torture which it is the business of the plain ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... or nothing can be more unscrupulous. It told Saul that he did well in persecuting the Christians. It has goaded countless multitudes of various creeds to endless forms of self-torture. The cities of India are full of cripples it has made. The hill-sides of Syria are riddled with holes, where miserable hermits, whose lives it had palsied, lived and died like the vermin they harbored. Our libraries ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and says in a low voice:] Because I seem to find a sort of—of salutary self-torture in allowing Aline to do ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... in self-torture of these spiritual brethren endured in all about a year and a half, and closed with Speed's marriage. Lincoln was now entirely delivered from his demon. He wrote Speed a charming letter, serene, affectionate, touched with gentle banter, valiant though with a hint of disillusion as to their ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... comfort him; but she knew that he was interested in her only because she was Margaret's friend. At last he got up and, taking his pipe from his pocket, filled it silently. She was terrified at the look on his face. The first time she had ever seen him, Susie wondered at the possibility of self-torture which was in that rough-hewn countenance; but she had never dreamed that it could express such unutterable suffering. Its lines were suddenly changed, and it ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
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