Masochism Quotes

“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, Tropic of Cancer

“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?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“So,” Wanda cried, “a woman in furs is nothing more than a large cat, a charged electric battery?”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“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, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“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?”
― Santa Teresa de Jesús, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself

“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

“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, The Wood of Suicides

“In good old Colonial Dunsboro, masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“The sadist desires to command and control. The masochist desires to be freed from the burdens of liberty. That is Socialism.”
― A.E. Samaan, From a "Race of Masters" to a "Master Race": 1948 to 1848

“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

“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

“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.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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

“Inside every sadist is a masochist, cringing to taste his own medicine.”
― Roger Ebert, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

“You mean you are now my slave without illusions, and for that reason you shall feel the weight of my foot without mercy.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“You have taught me what love is. Your serene form of worship let me forget two thousand years.”
― Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs

“Hitler reacted primarily in a sadistic fashion toward people, but masochistically toward fate, history, the “higher power” of nature.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“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.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life

“Even the subject’s destruction of himself cannot take place without libidinal satisfaction.”
― Sigmund Freud

“Thus masochism and sadism appear as the fundamental forms of psychosexual perversion, which may make their appearance at any point in the domain of sexual aberration.”
― Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Legal Study

“C’est pourquoi aussi le masochiste élabore des contrats, tandis que le sadique abomine et déchire tout contrat. Le sadique a besoin d’institutions, mais le masochiste, de relations contractuelles. Le Moyen Âge, avec profondeur, distinguait deux sortes de diabolisme, ou deux perversions fondamentales : l’une par possession, l’autre par pacte d’alliance. C’est le sadique qui pense en termes de possession instituée, et le masochiste en termes d’alliance contractée. La possession est la folie propre du sadisme, le pacte celle du masochisme.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Venus in Furs

“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.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

“Like the relentless storm, those who embrace masochism become the tempest that wreaks havoc upon the tranquil gardens of others' lives.”
― Sreena K.S., The Unapologetical Abyss

“The world can be divided into good and evil. I am on the side of justice. If I am on the side of good, then someone has to be on the side of evil. Without someone to play the villain, I can't exist. Then, who is going to protect the world?”
― The Queen of Hatred

“Masochism, however, slowly passes on not only to thwarting another will through complete submission, but to exhibiting and proving this failure in a peculiar way. Here is one phantasy as an example: A young man had been refused a new car by his father, in place of his old damaged one. One of the son’s daydreams dealt with the possibility that, while driving this broken-down car, he would be involved in an accident in front of his father’s shop. The car would run right into the show windows and he, covered with blood, would be carried into his father’s office. Don’t say that this only shows that in masochism the tendency prevails to “cut one’s nose to spite one’s face.” It is not only one’s own face that is damaged in such phantasies, it is the other one’s too. He "loses face” as the Chinese would say. He loses prestige. The father in this phantasy was to be convinced that his refusal was nonsensical and his behavior absurd. There is the concealed hope: It will hurt him more than me. By pursuing the course prescribed to him to the very end, the masochist demonstrates that it is the wrong course. It is like the hara-kiri of the Japanese. It is incorrect to assume that masochism is introverted sadism, a violent instinctual inclination that later became directed against the ego. In spite of all and at the bottom, its object remains the other person. We could rather term it sadism put on its head, violence upside down.”
― Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man

“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.”
― Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum

“Narcissistic relationships oscillate from sadism to masochism, turning love into hate unstoppably”
― Xanya Sofra Ph.D, Brainwashed: From Illusion to Autonomy

“A masochist only feels the feeling of pleasure.”
― Dominic Riccitello

“Nothing is more terrifying than how easily we beg for chains”
― Abyssino

“do not fall in love with your suffering, never presume that your suffering is in itself a proof of your authenticity. Renunciation of pleasure can easily turn into pleasure of renunciation itself”
― Žižek, Slavoj