Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure?

Answer: Of himself.

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

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was “sublime and beautiful,” the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.

amour proper.

A sense of one's own worth

For that one could not blame even the laws of nature, though the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything.

Cannot travel faster. Cant live longer. Diseases are not entirely in my control. Cant reduce distance etc

Why, how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I am to build? Where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from?

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 only gain of civilization for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely nothing more.

that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate.

that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

for what is a man without desires, without free will and without choice,

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering,

Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action.

I grew used to everything, or rather I voluntarily resigned myself to enduring it.

“Oh, if you only knew what thoughts and feelings I am capable of, how cultured I am!”

I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea.

And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?