Notes from Underground & The Double Quotes

“To think too much is a disease.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“We have all lost touch with life, we all limp, each to a greater or lesser degree.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Twice two is four is not life, gentlemen, but the beginning of death.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Do you ask why I tortured and tormented myself? The answer is that it was too boring to sit and do nothing, and so I indulged my fancy.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I am to blame because, first of all, I am cleverer than anybody else around me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“This pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it is was vile, bit it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Long live the underground!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Which is better a cheap happiness or lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Even then I already carried the underground in my soul.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I couldn't even conceive of playing a secondary part...Either a hero, or dirt, there was nothing in between. That was my undoing”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“But all these are golden daydreams.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“This pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it is was vile, but it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“That’s why I drink, to find sympathy and feeling in drink . . . I drink because I want to suffer profoundly!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Although I committed this cruelty deliberately, it came from my wicked head, not from my heart. It was so artificial, so intellectual, so contrived, so bookish.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I say, let the world perish, if I can always drink my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I am a sick man....I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man. I think there is something wrong with my liver.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Bunlar ülküleri uğruna kıllarını bile kıpırdatmazlar, azılı birer haydut, birer hırsızdırlar, ama ilk ülkülerine olan saygılarını taş çatlasa yitirmezler; ruhça son derece namusludurlar. Evet, efendim, en bayağı, en aşağılık insanların aynı zamanda namussuzluk simgesi kişiler olarak kalabilmeleri ancak bizde olanaklıdır. Yineliyorum, bizim romantikler arasında isini bilen madrabazlar (madrabaz sözcüğünü iltifat olsun diye kullanıyorum) öylesine çok çıkıyor ve bunlar öyle bir gerçekçilik sezgisi, öyle bir beceriklilik gösteriyorlar ki, şeflerinin de, arkadaşlarının da ağzı bir karış açık kalıyor.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“One’s own free”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“And that’s not all: you say that then science itself will teach man (although in my opinion this is already a luxury) that in actual fact he possesses neither will nor whims and never did have them and that he is nothing more than a sort of piano key or organ stop; and”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“You see, gentlemen, perhaps I only consider myself an intelligent person because all my life I’ve never been capable of starting or finishing anything.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“Remember that I was talking of revenge not so long ago. (You probably didn’t get my meaning very well.) I said that a man avenges himself because he finds justice in it. That means he has found his primary cause, has found a basis for his actions, namely, justice. Therefore he is completely reassured on all counts and consequently takes his revenge calmly and successfully, convinced that what he is doing is just and honourable. But for the life of me I can see neither justice here nor virtue and consequently, if I start taking my revenge, it’s really out of spite. Spite, of course, can overcome everything – all my doubts – and therefore it could quite successfully serve instead of a primary cause for the simple reason that it’s not a cause.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“repeat, I repeat most emphatically: all spontaneous people and men of action are active because they are dull-witted and limited. What is the explanation for this? Well, it’s like this: as a result of their limitations they take immediate and secondary causes for primary ones and are thus persuaded more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for whatever they do and so they are reassured. And that’s the main thing. You see, in order to begin to act you must be completely sure in advance that there are no residual doubts whatsoever.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I repeat, I repeat most emphatically: all spontaneous people and men of action are active because they are dull-witted and limited.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“This kind of man makes me green with envy. He is stupid – that I don’t dispute with you, but perhaps your normal man ought to be stupid – how do you know? Perhaps it’s even a very fine thing. And I’m all the more convinced of this suspicion, so to speak, because if one takes for example the antithesis of the normal man, that is, the man of heightened consciousness, who of course has not sprung from the bosom of nature but from a test tube (this is already verging on mysticism, gentlemen, but I’m suspicious of that, too), then this test-tube man will sometimes capitulate when confronted with his antithesis, to such a degree that for all his heightened awareness he will in all good conscience consider himself a mouse and not a man. Granted, an intensely aware mouse, but a mouse all the same, whereas the other is a man, so consequently … etc, etc. The important thing is that he, of his own accord, considers himself a mouse: no one asked him to do so – and that’s an important point.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“that. I mean this in all seriousness: very likely I would have managed to derive pleasure of a kind even from that – I mean of course the pleasure of despair; but it’s in despair that you discover the most intense pleasure, especially when you are acutely conscious of the hopelessness of your predicament.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I broached the subject because I’d like to find out for certain: do others experience the same kind of pleasure? Let me explain: the pleasure I experienced came directly from being too vividly aware of my own degradation, from the feeling of having gone too far; that it was foul but that it couldn’t be otherwise; that there’s no way out for you, that you’d never make yourself a different person; that even if there remained enough time and faith to change yourself into something different you most probably wouldn’t want to change yourself.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“I’m a sick man … I’m a spiteful man. I’m an unattractive man. I think there’s something wrong with my liver. But I understand damn all about my illness and I can’t say for certain which part of me is affected. I’m not receiving treatment for it and never have, although I do respect medicine and doctors. What’s more, I’m still extremely superstitious – well, sufficiently to respect medicine. (I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.) Oh no, I’m refusing treatment out of spite. That’s something you probably can’t bring yourselves to understand. Well, I understand it. Of course, in this case I can’t explain exactly to you whom I’m trying to harm by my spite. I realize perfectly well that I cannot ‘besmirch’ the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that by all this I’m harming no one but myself. All the same, if I refuse to have treatment it’s out of spite. So, if my liver hurts, let it hurt even more!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double

“The whimsical but keen chronicler of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Petersburg Chronicle’3 (1847) touches on the roots of the underground when he writes that ‘happiness lies … in eternal indefatigable activity and in the practical employment of all our proclivities and capacities’, but that ‘if man is dissatisfied, if he has no means to express himself and bring out what is best in him (not out of vanity, but as a result of the most natural human need to know, express, embody his “I” in real life)’, he undergoes some kind of extraordinary breakdown – drink, card-playing, gambling, brawling,”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground & The Double