#tortures

I crave ideas, and when an idea hits me, it grips me and it tortures me until I master it. ↗

— Gene Simmons

#grips #hits #i #idea #ideas

The tortures of present death disturb him not, but the recollection of his fall, fills him with a holy sorrow. ↗

— John Strachan

#disturb #fall #fills #him #his

Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. ↗

— Arthur Eddington

#himself #idol #mathematician #proof #pure

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#believe #boredom #even #even worse #fearing

To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster! ↗

— Denis Diderot

#attempt #complete #desire #destruction #end

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. ↗

— John Updike

#children #decided #education #equipped #fathers

Nothing has changed. The body is susceptible to pain, It must eat and breath air and sleep, It has thin skin and blood right underneath, An adequate stock of teeth and nails, Its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable. In tortures all this is taken into account. Nothing has changed. The body shudders as it is shuddered Before the founding of Rome and after, In the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are as they were, it’s just the earth that’s grown smaller, And whatever happens seems on the other side of the wall. Nothing has changed. It’s just that there are more people, Besides the old offenses, new ones have appeared, Real, imaginary, temporary, and none, But the howl with which the body responds to them, Was, and is, and ever will be a howl of innocence According to the time-honored scale and tonality. Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances, Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same. The body writhes, jerks, and tries to pull away Its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up, It turns blue, swells, salivates, and bleeds. Nothing has changed. Except of course for the course of boundaries, The lines of forests, coasts, deserts, and glaciers. Amid these landscapes traipses the soul, Disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away, Alien to itself, elusive At times certain, at others uncertain of its own existence, While the body is and is and is And has no place of its own. ↗

— Wisława Szymborska

#change

Reality is never as bad as a nightmare, as the mental tortures we inflict on ourselves. ↗

— Sammy Davis, Jr.

#inflict #mental #never #nightmare #ourselves

Everything is vain and tortures the spirit instead of calming and satisfying it. ↗

— Johann Georg Hamann

#everything #instead #satisfying #spirit #tortures

A prisoner in the Inquisition is never allowed to see the face of his accuser, or of the witnesses against him, but every method is taken by threats and tortures, to oblige him to accuse himself, and by that means corroborate their evidence. ↗

— John Foxe

#accuser #against #allowed #every #evidence