oyshik's Reviews > Notes from the Underground

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Translator: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

1st read: 3/5
2nd read: 5/5

Update: 100%

quotes:

34. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."

33. And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better-cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?

32. I am not ashamed of my poverty......on contrary, I look with pride on my poverty. I am poor but honorable......one can be poor and honorable.

31. People say it's a trial to have children. Who says that. It is heavenly happiness!

30. Love is a holy mystery and ought to be hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. That makes it holier and better. They respect one another more, and much is built on respect. And if once there has been love if they have been married for love, why should love pass away?

29.And no one, no one should know what passes between husband and wife if they love one another. And whatever quarrels there may be between them they ought not to call in their own mothers to judge between them and tell tales of one another. They are their own judges.

28. Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys. If he counted them up as he ought, he would see that every lot has enough happiness provided for it.

27. Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud- there was nothing between.

26. There was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are EVERYONE," I thought and pondered.

25. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstances, but always, at all the times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and slave.

24. Today, for instance, I am particularly oppressed by one memory of a distant past. It came back vividly to my mind a few days ago, and has remained haunting me like an annoying tune that one cannot get rid of. And yet I must get rid of it somehow . I have hundreds of such reminiscences; but at times some one stands out from the hundred and oppresses me for some reason. I believe that if I write down I should get rid of it. Why no try?

23. Perhaps it is simply that I am a coward. And perhaps that I purposely imagine an audience before me in order that i may be more dignified while I write.

22. Every man has reminiscences which he would not to tell everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret.

21. I ought to put you underground for forty years without anything to do and then come you in your cellar, to find out what stage you have reached! How can a man be left with nothing to do for forty years?

20. But do you know what: I am convinced that we underground folk ought to be kept on a curb. Though we may sit forty years underground without speaking, when we do come out into the light of day and break out we talk and talk and talk.

19. Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you.

18. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than anything.

17. I think man will never renounce real suffering, that is, destruction and chaos. Why, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

16. I hold no brief for suffering nor for well-being either. I am standing for.........my caprice, and for its being guaranteed to me when necessary.

15. Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as a great benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact.

14. 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.

13. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves.

12. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty.

11. Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of men consists?

10. Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is it to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

9. I say, in earnest, that I should probably have been able to discover even in that a peculiar sort of enjoyment- the enjoyment of course of despair; but in despair, there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.

8. I am as suspicious and prone to take offense as a humpback or a dwarf. But upon my word I sometimes have had moments when if I had happened to be slapped in the face I should, perhaps, have been positively glad of it.

7. perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.

6. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.

5. A man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.

4. Now I'm living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.


3. It was only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect.

2. I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else.


1. I am a sick man.....I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.