Masochism Quotes

• I ache for the touch of your lips dear, but much more for the touch of your whips dear.

  Tom Lehrer

  Lips, Ache, Dear

  Song: The Masochism Tango

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• Masochism is a valuable job skill.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Jobs, Skills, Valuable

  Chuck Palahniuk (2001). “Choke: A Novel”, Anchor Books

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• There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart.

  Henry Miller

  Heart, Tropic Of Cancer

  Henry Miller, Norman Mailer (1976). “Genius and lust: a journey through the major writings of Henry Miller”, Grove Press

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• Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

  Germaine Greer

  Love, Sexy, Lust

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• 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

  Hurt, Forgiving, May

  "Warts'n'all" by Kate Kellaway, www.theguardian.com. October 16, 2005.

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Want

  "Josh Hartnett Interview - RESURRECTING THE CHAMP". Interview with Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub, collider.com. August 21, 2007.

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

  Erich Fromm

  Sadism, Instinct, Sexuality

  Erich Fromm (2013). “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.37, Open Road Media

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

  Tom Lehrer

  Dancing, Tango, Raises

  Song: The Masochism Tango

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• Love, love, love – all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.

  Germaine Greer

  Love, Broken Heart, Kissing

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Jobs, Skills, Valuable

  Chuck Palahniuk (2001). “Choke: A Novel”, Anchor Books

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

  Faina Ranevskaya

  Hockey, Ice, Two

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• Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.

  Laurence Olivier

  Funny, Humorous, Acting

  In Time 3 July 1978, p. 33

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

  Jeanne Moreau

  Doors, Curiosity, Obstinacy

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• 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

  Sadness, Games, Validation

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

  David Levithan

  Realizing, Ifs

  David Levithan (2011). “The Lover's Dictionary: A Novel”, p.134, Macmillan

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• Nostalgia is masochism and masochism is something masochists love to share.

  Andrei Codrescu

  Nostalgia, Share

  Andrei Codrescu (2006). “New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City”, p.195, Algonquin Books

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• 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

  Writing, Men, Self

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• What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long.

  Doris Lessing

  Men, Long, Kitchen

  Doris Lessing (2012). “The Golden Notebook”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

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• 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

  Kindness, Genuine Love, Justice

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• I wrote in Les Mots that "I have often thought against myself." That sentence has not been
  understood either. Critics have seen in it a confession of masochism. But that is how one
  should think: revolting against everything "inculcated'' that one may have within oneself.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Thinking, May, Confession

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• ...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

  Falling In Love, Color, Mind

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• 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

  College, Spirit, Students

  Speech in New Orleans, 19 October 1969, in 'Frankly Speaking' (1970) ch. 3

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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.

  Elizabeth Gould Davis

  Dream, Sex, Integrity

  "The First Sex". Book by Elizabeth Gould Davis. Chapter 22: "Woman in the Aquarian Age", 1971.

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

  Will Self

  Shapes, Landscape, Enjoy

  "Charles Ray". Interview with Will Self, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 21, 2013.

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• Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!

  Jennifer Stone

  Writing, Being In Love, Luxury

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