Voluptas

“ What, then, must we think of the diabolical savage who exercises the worst of all cruelties, because the most lasting and affecting to both body and mind, on the most beautiful and amiable of all creatures on this side heaven, made expressly for his happiness, solace, and delight, by first corrupting and betray­ing her, and then basely abandoning her to perish in want, pain, wretchedness, and misery? ”

“ A disgust, bitter as a nausea, an almost savage hate, arose from his heart at the thought that the following night he would again have that woman near him on the same pillow, that he would again hear the breathing of the sleeping woman, that he would again smell the odor and feel the contact of that heated skin, and then that the day would break again and pass by in the usual idleness, amidst the torture of perpetual alternatives. ”

“ Who is it that lives in an atmosphere of perpetual strife and loud quarrellings? "Whose is groaning?"—that sustained sigh of desponding and irremediable misery. "Whose are causeless wounds?"—not only the bruise and the gash which result from furious sparrings or unforeseen falls, but also wounds of the spirit, self-loathing, and shame, the thought of what might have been, the realization of a ruined home, and of suffering wife and little ones, and the conviction that the evil can now never be undone. ”

“ If you should wed, may a father's curse
⁠Be your swift and sure undoing.
“My curse shall feed on your fields of corn,
⁠On your roof-tree make its nesting,
Your wife shall wish your child unborn
⁠As he pines on her sore heart resting.”
Now when this cruel oath he said
⁠The youth did chide him, crying,
“Since I have neither field nor bed
⁠Your curse shall fall to dying. ”

“ Some came out sick and faint; some with faces deadly pale and burning eyes and tight-shut lips; and some blaspheming aloud and hurling curses on the monsters whose pleasure and delight it was to work such abhorred wrong on poor human flesh. ”

“ Under fear are comprehended sloth, shame, terror, cowardice, fainting, confusion, astonishment.—In pleasure they comprehend malevolence, that is pleased at another's misfortune, delight, boastfulness, and the like. To lust they associate anger, fury, hatred, enmity, discord, wants, desire, and other feelings of that kind. ”

“ The sentiments of voluptuousness, sorrow and pity, which psychology has studied, appear to betray sometimes a veritable perversion, and to contain as elements the love of sorrow for sorrow itself.... Often one has to do with people who desire their own weal primarily, and then the woe of others. One or other of these psychical states is visible in many cases of wickedness; for example, in the fact of a rich manufacturer falsely accusing a young man, who is going to marry, of being affected by a venereal disease, and maintaining his assertion for the pleasure of doing so ... ”

“ There is pleasure in gluttony, in drunkenness, in lust, in pride, in avarice, in revenge. But where is the pleasure in an oath? The sensualist, the hypocrite, the miser, and the murderer can at least plead strong temptation, can at least urge that they get something, however pitiful, in exchange for eternal loss. ”

“ Is not such a cruel bondage certain to affect both health and temper? Their first feeling is one of pain and suffering; they find every necessary movement hampered; more miserable than a galley slave, in vain they struggle, they become angry, they cry. Their first words you say are tears. That is so. From birth you are always checking them, your first gifts are fetters, your first treatment, torture. Their voice alone is free ”

“ Thus the appearance of a cheerful countenance gives us pleasure, and of a melancholy one makes us sorrowful. Yawning, and sometimes vomiting, are thus propagated by sympathy; and some people of delicate fibres, at the presence of a spectacle of misery, have felt pain in the same parts of their bodies, that were diseased or mangled in the object they saw. ”

“ He had all his life been tortured by a furious and destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel eruptions. ”

“ Sick of a fever; a great fever, says S. Luke. Tropologically, the fever of the soul is the fire of concupiscence, the burning heat of lust, of gluttony, of pride, of envy, &c. Listen to S. Ambrose (lib. 4 in Luc. c. 4, ver. 38) . “Under the type of Simon’s wife’s mother, our flesh languishes under the fevers of various spiritual sicknesses, and is tempest-tossed by the varied enticements of immoderate desires. The fever of love, I may say, is no less than of heat. The one inflames the mind, the other the body. Our avarice is a fever, our lust is a fever. ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ From time to time he raised himself, and seeming to hold the disease in his joined hands, opened them at once into the air, blowing, as if he drove away some evil spirit. During those rites, an old woman in tears howled with great violence in the child's ears. ”

“ A drunken father may impel epilepsy, madness or idiocy in the child. Ungoverned passions, from love to hate, from hope to fear, when indulged in overmuch by the parents, may unloose the furies of unrestrained madness in the minds of the children. "The insane may often trace their sad humiliation and utter unfitness for life's duties back through a tedious line of unrestrained passion, of prejudice, bigotry, and superstition unbridled, of lust unchecked, of intemperance uncontrolled, of avarice unmastered, and of nerve resources wasted, exhausted, and made bankrupt before its time. ”

“ The youth, who seem'd to watch a time for sin,
Approach'd the careless guide, and thrust him in;
Plunging he falls, and rising lifts his head,
Then flashing turns, and sinks amongst the dead.
⁠Wild, sparkling rage inflames the father's eyes,
He bursts the bands of fear, and madly cries,
Detested wretch—but scarce his speech began,
When the strange partner seem'd no longer man. ”

“ Hereupon it is that the appetites will be tormented with the fury of their own passions, which will come forth in bands, and with great vehemence, namely, fears, melancholy, irksomeness, agonies, anger, desperation, envy, and rage, with such a cruel war among themselves that they will rend one another in pieces. ”

“ By a sort of intoxication, a species of madness, resulting from the severity of his sufferings, he rushed blindly into new and ever more cruel and senseless torments; aggravating and complicating his miserable state in a thousand ways; passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, without being able to hold back or to stop for one moment in his giddy descent. He seemed to be devoured by an inextinguishable fever, the heat of which made all the germs of human lust lying dormant in the hidden depths of his being flourish and grow big. ”

“ A thousand evil thoughts intrude Tumultuous in my breast; Which indispose me for my food, And rob me of my rest. Lord I am sick, regard my cry, And set my spirit free; Say, canst thou let a sinner die, Who longs to live to thee? ”

“ It is a sickness that gives raging pain—like a poisoned arrow in an open wound, and devours all that is near it like a fire-brand, and is harder to cure than the disease which is killing that coughing wench. To be possessed by that demon of anguish is to suffer the torture of the damned—or else," and her voice sank to softness, "to be more blest than the Gods, happy as they are. ”

“ Sometimes a child would cry, a man utter an oath, a woman shriek: then would come harsh orders delivered in a gruff voice, more swearing, the grounding of arms and more often than not a dull, flat sound like a blow struck against human flesh, followed by a volley of curses, or a cry of pain. ”

“ Pain, and Not Cruelty, the Essential Element in Sadism and Masochism—Pain Felt as Pleasure—Does the Sadist Identify Himself with the Feelings of his Victim?—The Sadist often a Masochist in Disguise—The Spectacle of Pain or Struggle as a Sexual Stimulant. ”

“ It is not true that there has been no time to test it. For thousands of years we have been proving and proving it, over and over. We have tried the experiment of fierceness; and blood answered blood. We have tried the experiment of lust; and lust has left in the mouth the odor of corruption and a fiercer fever. We have forced the body into the most refined and perverse pleasures and found ourselves worn out and heavy-hearted, lying upon filth. ”

“ Is there a katharsis that somehow transforms our pity and fear into relief and pleasure? There is something of the sort in the mere exercise of violent emotion, which in a measure carries its own relief and cure. ”

“ For it is not right to pour into the burning season of life the hottest of all liquids—wine—adding, as it were, fire to fire. [62] For hence wild impulses and burning lusts and fiery habits are kindled; and young men inflamed from within become prone to the indulgence of vicious propensities; so that signs of injury appear in their body, the members of lust coming to maturity sooner than they ought. ”

“ For every one that is not awake to wisdom, but is steeped in wine, is a sluggard. “And the drunkard,” he says, “shall be clothed in rags, and be ashamed of his drunkenness in the presence of onlookers.” [477] For the wounds of the sinner are the rents of the garment of the flesh, the holes made by lusts, through which the shame of the soul within is seen—namely sin, by reason of which it will not be easy to save the garment, that has been torn away all round, that has rotted away in many lusts, and has been rent asunder from salvation. ”

“ Dimly she realized that this strange, almost physical soreness, which made him shrink from her presence as a man with weak eyes shrinks from the light, was the outward sign of a secret violence in his soul, yet she ministered helplessly to each passing explosion of temper as if it were the cause instead of the result of his suffering. ”

“ Her first impulse was one of grief and despair. “Dead!” she exclaimed; “dead! and already cold! Oh, goodness!” And this woman burst into tears.
The tears of the wicked are ominous. For a bad man to weep, he must have suffered much; and, with him, the reaction of suffering, instead of softening the soul, inflames it to a dangerous anger.
Thus, after yielding to that first painful emotion, the mistress of My Lord felt herself transported with rage and hate—yes, hate—violent hate for the young girls, who had been the involuntary cause of the dog’s death. ”

“ And it is from this cause that in human beings bodily suffering expresses itself not only in contortions, but in shrieks and groans—that in anger, and fear, and grief, the gesticulations are accompanied by shouts and screams—that delightful sensations are followed by exclamations—and that we hear screams of joy and shouts of exultation. ”

“ On the other hand, those evil spirits, who by long custom, have contracted in the body, habits of lust, sensuality, malice and revenge, an aversion to every thing that is good, just, or laudable, are naturally seasoned and prepared for pain and misery. Their torments have already taken root in them; they cannot be happy when divested of the body, unless we may suppose, that Providence will in a manner create them anew, and work a miracle in the rectification of their faculties. ”

“ Is it for you to fill up our cup of misery? Will you destroy the dearest and sweetest of our hopes? One son is gasping his last breath before our eyes, the other, still in infancy, will perish from the transports of your rage. ”

“ For we must necessarily understand by "sound" those whose minds are under no perturbation from any motion as if it were a disease. They who are differently affected we must necessarily call "unsound." So that nothing is better than what is usual in Latin, to say that they who are run away with by their lust or anger have quitted the command over themselves; though anger includes lust, for anger is defined to be the lust of revenge. ”

“ Teach them to shun all children who indulge in this loathsome habit, or all children who talk about these things. The sin is terrible, and is, in fact, worse than lying or stealing. For, although these are wicked and will ruin their souls, yet this habit of self-abuse will ruin both soul and body.
14. "If the sexual organs are handled, it brings too much blood to these parts, and this produces a diseased condition; it also causes disease in other organs of the body, because they are left with a less amount of blood than they ought to have. ”

“ His anger cooled at the sight of the blood; fearful pangs of conscience seized the strong man, he repented his rash deed, turned hurriedly back, hoping he might yet quench the stream of blood, and save the unhappy boy. ”

“ Ye have too cruel eyes, and ye look wantonly towards the sufferers. Hath not your lust just disguised itself and taken the name of fellow-suffering?
And also this parable give I to you: Not a few who meant to cast out their devil, went thereby into the swine themselves.
To whom chastity is difficult, it is to be dissuaded: lest it become the road to hell—to filth and lust of soul.
Do I speak of filthy things? That is not the worst thing for me to do.
Not when the truth is filthy, but when it is shallow, does the discerning one go unwillingly into its waters. ”

“ A most violent passion it is where it taketh place, an unspeakable torment, a hellish torture, an infernal plague, as Ariosto calls it, “a fury, a continual fever, full of suspicion, fear, and sorrow, a martyrdom, a mirth-marring monster. ”