Notes from the Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age.

To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral.

Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly I will tell you who do: f...

But yet I am firmly persuaded that a great deal of consciousness, every sort of consciousness, in fact, is a disease.

Man is stupid, you know, phenomenally stupid; or rather he is not at all stupid, but he is so ungrateful that you could not find another like him in all creation.

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