Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I’d respect myself then. Respect myself precisely because I’d at least be capable of having laziness in me; there would be in me at least one positive quality, as it were, which I myself could be sure of.

p 19 in my hard copy

You see: reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life—that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches.

p 28 in hard. copy

Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos (it’s indisputable that he sometimes loves them very much; that is a fact) because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating?

p 33

Achieving he likes, but having achieved he does not quite like, and that, of course, is terribly funny.

p34

And why are you so firmly, so solemnly convinced that only the normal and the positive, in short, that only well-being, is profitable for man? Is reason not perhaps mistaken as to profits? Maybe man does not love well-being only? Maybe he loves suffering just as much? Maybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being? For man sometimes loves suffering terribly much, to the point of passion, and that is a fact.

excellent

Whether it’s good or bad, it’s sometimes also very pleasant to break something.

At home, to begin with, I mainly used to read. I wished to stifle with external sensations all that was ceaselessly boiling up inside me. And among external sensations the only one possible for me was reading. Reading was, of course, a great help—it stirred, delighted, and tormented me. But at times it bored me terribly.

Either hero or mud, there was no in between. And that is what ruined me, because in the mud I comforted myself with being a hero at other times, and the hero covered up the mud: for an ordinary man, say, it’s shameful to be muddied, but a hero is too lofty to be completely muddied, consequently one can get muddied.

excellent