Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years.

perhaps the normal man should be stupid, how do you know? Perhaps it is very beautiful, in fact.

There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.

it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination.

it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing.

knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself.

in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later--that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.

In the depth of my heart there was no faith in my suffering,

I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.