Notes From Underground

Notes From Underground — Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

what can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure? Answer: about himself. — 2025-08-03

I’ll tell you solemnly that I wanted many times to become an insect. But I was not deemed worthy even of that. — 2026-03-14

I swear to you, gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. — 2026-03-14

all this occurs according to the normal and basic laws of heightened consciousness and the inertia that follows directly from these laws, and consequently there is not only nothing you can do to change yourself, but there is simply nothing to do at all. — 2026-03-14

it is in despair that the most burning pleasures occur, especially when one is all too highly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position. — 2026-03-14

‘m to blame, finally, because even if there were any magnanimity in me, I would be the one most tormented by the consciousness of its utter futility. — 2026-03-14

because l’homme de le nature et de la verite, with his innate stupidity, regards his revenge quite simply as justice; whereas the mouse, as a result of its heightened consciousness, denies it any justice. — 2026-03-16

believing neither in its right to revenge itself nor in the success of its vengeance, and knowing beforehand that it will suffer a hundred times more from all its attempts at revenge than will the object of its vengeance, who will perhaps not even scratch at the bite. — 2026-03-16

But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this conscious burying oneself alive from grief for forty years in the underground, in this assiduously produced and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness of one’s position, in all this poison of unsatisfied desires penetrating inward, in all this fever of hesitations, of decisions taken forever, and repentances coming again a moment later, that the very sap of that strange pleasure I was talking about consists. — 2026-03-16

Once it’s proved to you, for example, that you descended from an ape, there’s no use making a wry face, just take it for what it is. — 2026-03-16

as it turns out, there isn’t even anyone to be angry with; that there is no object to be found, and maybe never will be; that it’s all a sleight-of-hand, a stacked deck, a cheat, that it’s all just slops - nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts! — 2026-03-16

How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself? — 2026-03-17

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I’ve never been able to start or finish anything. — 2026-03-22

. But what’s to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble - that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void. — 2026-03-22

Oh, if I were doing nothing only out of laziness. Lord, how I’d respect myself then. — 2026-03-22