Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness—a real thorough-going illness.

Such a gentleman simply dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, and nothing but a wall will stop him.

Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything.

But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

The characteristics of our romantic are to understand everything, to see everything and to see it often incomparably more clearly than our most realistic minds see it; to