Notes From Underground Quotes
"The pleasure here lay precisely in the too vivid consciousness of one’s own humiliation."
"To be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."
"I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness."
"I’ve been living like this for a long time – about twenty years. I’m forty now."
"I will not, of course, be able to explain to you precisely who is going to suffer in this case from my wickedness."
"My liver hurts; well, then let it hurt even worse!"
"I was a wicked official. I was rude, and took pleasure in it."
"But do you know, gentlemen, what was the main point about my wickedness?"
"I’m foaming at the mouth, but bring me some little doll, give me some tea with a bit of sugar, and maybe I’ll calm down."
"An intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being."
"The more conscious I was of the good and of all this 'beautiful and lofty,' the deeper I kept sinking into my mire."
"I ended up almost believing (and maybe indeed believing) that this perhaps was my normal condition."
"For I would surely be able to do nothing with my magnanimity: neither to forgive, because my offender might have hit me according to the laws of nature, and the laws of nature cannot be forgiven."
"Once it’s proved to you that you descended from an ape, there’s no use making a wry face, just take it for what it is."
"I won’t break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength enough to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough."
"To reach, by way of the most inevitable logical combinations, the most revolting conclusions on the eternal theme that you yourself seem somehow to blame even for the stone wall."
"The more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!"
"And why not? There is also pleasure in a toothache."
"The consciousness that your enemy is nowhere to be found, and yet there is pain."
"I ask you, gentlemen: listen sometime to the moaning of an educated man of the nineteenth century who is suffering from a toothache."
"The only possible thing to do then would be to stop up our five senses and immerse ourselves in contemplation."
"Man needs only independent wanting, whatever this independence may cost and wherever it may lead."
"What is man without desires, without will, and without wantings, if not a sprig in an organ barrel?"
"I, for one, would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, amid the universal future reasonableness, some gentleman should emerge and say: 'Well, gentlemen, why don’t we kick all this to the devil for the sole purpose of living once more according to our own stupid will!'"
"Maybe man loves suffering just as much? Maybe suffering is just as profitable for him as well-being?"
"Suffering, for example, is inadmissible in vaudevilles, I know that. In a crystal palace it is even unthinkable: suffering is doubt, it is negation, and what good is a crystal palace in which one can have doubts?"
"But what’s to be done if I’ve taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion?"
"But we, in our Russian land, have no fools; that is a known fact; that’s what makes us different from all those other German lands."
"The properties of our romantic are to understand everything, to see everything, and to see often incomparably more clearly than our very most positive minds do."
"He’s a broad man, our romantic, and the foremost knave of all our knaves, I can assure you of that."
"Yes, sirs, only among us can the most inveterate scoundrel be perfectly and even loftily honest in his soul, while not ceasing in the least to be a scoundrel."
"The versatility is indeed amazing, and God knows what it will turn and develop into in subsequent circumstances, and what it promises us for our times to come."
"Dreams came to me with a particular sweetness and intensity after a little debauch, they came with repentance and tears, with curses and raptures."
"Everything, however, would always end most happily with a lazy and rapturous transition to art – that is, to beautiful forms of being, quite ready-made, highly stolen from poets and novelists, and adapted to every possible service or demand."
"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."
"I could get used to anything – that is, not really get used, but somehow voluntarily consent to endure it."
"But how much love, Lord, how much love I used to experience in those dreams of mine, in those 'escapes into everything beautiful and lofty'."
"I love thought, M’sieur Zverkov; I love true friendship, on an equal footing, and not ... hm ... I love ... However, why not? I, too, shall drink to your health, M’sieur Zverkov."
"Everyone has some reminiscences in their lives which are like marble blocks, out of which they carve for themselves an image of a temple of remembrance."
"I began to be tormented by the idea: what if she comes? What shall I do then?"
"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."
"I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity."
"If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself."
"Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!"
"The darker the night, the brighter the stars, the deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart."
"I’m forever exaggerating; that’s where I’m lame."
"The insult will elevate and purify her through hatred... maybe also forgiveness."
"I want peace. I’d sell the whole world for a kopeck this minute, just not to be bothered."
"We don’t even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it’s called!"
"It’s a burden for us even to be men – men with real, our own bodies and blood; we’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace."
"Soon we’ll contrive to be born somehow from an idea."
"I was so great an egoist, I had in fact so little respect for people, that I could scarcely imagine she, too, would do that."
"Won’t it be better if she now carries an insult away with her forever? An insult – but this is purification; it’s the most stinging and painful consciousness!"
"And how is it inconceivable, if I had managed so to corrupt myself morally, had grown so unaccustomed to 'living life,' that I had dared just before to reproach and shame her for coming to me to hear 'pathetic words'?"