Notes from Underground

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

I was lying when I said just now that I was a spiteful official. I was lying from spite.

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,

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was "sublime and beautiful," the more deeply I sank into my mire

(I have always considered myself cleverer than any of the people surrounding me,

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

But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?

I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, à propos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!"

but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of man.

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.

One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very "most advantageous advantage"

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 it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never understand),

over-philosophical; it's the result of forty years underground!

But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid—simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may

it preserves for us what is most precious and most important—that is, our personality, our individuality.

best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death.

When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station—and

What is the dear fellow doing now? Whom is he walking over?

Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly.

No, they, they and no one else must pay for my walking up and down!

"Why, you... speak somehow like a book," she said, and again there was a note of irony in her voice.

To this hour I am lost in admiration when I recall the truly gentlemanly, good-humoured, candid tone of my letter. With tact and good-breeding,

"I exaggerate everything, that is where I go wrong," I repeated to myself every hour.

That's virginity, to be sure! Freshness of soil!

with me loving meant tyrannising and showing my moral superiority.

Resentment—why, it is purification;

for we are all divorced from life,

you have taken your cowardice for good sense,