Quotes from Notes from Underground

“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I love, I can only love the one I've left behind, stained with my blood when, ungrateful wretch that I am, I extinguished myself and shot myself through the heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that one, and even on the night I parted from him I loved him perhaps more poignantly than ever. We can truly love only with suffering and through suffering! We know not how to love otherwise. We know no other love. I want suffering in order to love. I want and thirst this very minute to kiss , with tears streaming down my cheeks, this one and only I have left behind. I don't want and won't accept any other.
”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“The pleasure of despair. But then, it is in despair that we find the most acute pleasure, especially when we are aware of the hopelessness of the situation...
...everything is a mess in which it is impossible to tell what's what, but that despite this impossibility and deception it still hurts you, and the less you can understand, the more it hurts.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“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.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“you don't need free will to determine that twice two is four. that's not what i call free will”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I've never been a coward at heart, although I've always been a coward in action;”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“.. ثم إن الحب لسرٌّ رباني، ينبغي أن يظل في مأمن من كافة العيون الغريبة، مهما يحدث له. ذلك أدعى للتقديس، وهو أفضل وأجمل.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness- a real thorough-going illness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“It was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“Now answer me, sincerely, honestly, who lives past forty? I'll tell you who does: fools and scoundrels.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I hated my face, for example, found it odious, and even suspected that there was some mean expression in it, and therefore every time I came to work I made a painful effort to carry myself as independently as possible, and to express as much nobility as possible with my face. "let it not be a beautiful face," I thought, "but, to make up for that, let it be a noble, an expressive, and, above all, an extremely intelligent one." Yet I knew, with certainty and suffering, that i would never be able to express all those perfections with the face I had. The most terrible thing was that I found it positively stupid. And I would have been quite satisfied with intelligence. Let's even say I would even have agreed to a mean expression, provided only that at the same time my face be found terribly intelligent.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“But what can a decent man speak of with most pleasure? Answer: Of himself. Well, so I will talk about myself.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“أرسلك الله لي كي أكفر بك عن ذنوبي الهائلة"
من أجمل رسائل ‫#‏دوستويفسكي‬ وأقصرها لزوجته ‫#‏آنا‬ .”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“in despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one's position.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“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 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?”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“For the direct, lawful, immediate fruit of consciousness is inertia – that is, a conscious sitting with folded arms. I’ve already mentioned this above. I repeat, I emphatically repeat: ingenuous people and active figures are all active simply because they are dull and narrow minded. How to explain it? Here’s how: as a consequence of their narrow-mindedness, they take the most immediate and secondary causes for the primary ones, and thus become convinced more quickly and easily than others that they have found an indisputable basis for their doings, and so they feel at ease; and that, after all, is the main thing. For in order to begin to act, one must first be completely at ease, so that no more doubts remain. Well, and how am I, for example, to set myself at ease? Where are the primary causes on which I can rest, where are my bases? Where am I going to get them? I exercise thinking, and, consequently, for me every primary cause immediately drags with it yet another, still more primary one, and so on ad infinitum. Such is precisely the essence of all consciousness and thought. So,”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“I'll go this minute!' Of course, I remained.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“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. I, for instance, would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, A PROPOS of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and, putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: "I say, gentleman, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!" That again would not matter, but what is annoying is that he would be sure to find followers--such is the nature of man. And”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“You know the direct, legitimate fruit of consciousness is inertia, that is, conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded. I have referred to this already. I repeat, I repeat with emphasis: all “direct” persons and men of action are active just because they are stupid and limited. How explain that? I will tell you:”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“إذ ما العذاب والألم ... سوى المحرك الوحيد للوعي”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“وإني لأعتقد بإن أفضل تعريف يمكننا أن نُعرف به الإنسان هو أنه : كائنٌ عاق بساقين !!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“In any case civilization has made mankind if not more blood-thirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. 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.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

“The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations--and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to him. Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely bloodthirsty. In old days he saw justice in bloodshed and with his conscience at peace exterminated those he thought proper. 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. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls' breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these are barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though man has now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, he is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. But yet you are fully convinced that he will be sure to learn when he gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then man will cease from INTENTIONAL error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set his will against his normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach man (though to my mind it's a superfluous luxury) that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopaedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Notes from Underground

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“Say it."
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“A dim vastness is spread before our souls; the perceptions of our mind are as obscure as those of our vision... But alas! when we have attained our object, when the distant 'there' becomes the present 'here,' all is changed; we are as poor and circumscribed as ever, and our souls still languish for unattainable happiness.”
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“I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quote from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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the most insignificant thing takes over his mind. Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann's mayonnaise to a public meeting?”
― Tom Wolfe, quote from The Bonfire of the Vanities

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