Notes From The Underground Quotes

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.

To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.

I believe the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.

I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. An unattractive man. I think that my liver hurts.

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.

To be too conscious is an illness. A real thorough going illness.

To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

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" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms... [an]will attain his object-that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano-key!

This story ["The Depressed Person"] was the most painful thing I ever wrote. It's about narcissism, which is a part of depression. The character has traits of myself. I really lost friends while writing on that story, I became ugly and unhappy and just yelled at people. The cruel thing with depression is that it's such a self-centered illness - Dostoevsky shows that pretty good in his "Notes from Underground". The depression is painful, you're sapped/consumed by yourself; the worse the depression, the more you just think about yourself and the stranger and repellent you appear to others.