Notes from Underground and the Double

Love is a sacred secret, and ought to be kept hidden from all other eyes, whatever happens. It is holier that way, and better.

There’s another thing, Liza: people only like to count their sorrows, they don’t count their happinesses. But if they reckoned as they ought to, they would see that everybody gets his share of everything.

Now it is quite clear to me that, because of my infinite vanity and the consequent demands I made on myself, I very often looked at myself with frantic dislike, sometimes amounting to disgust, and therefore attributed the same attitude to everybody else.

Sometimes a man is intensely, even passionately, attached to suffering – that is a fact. About this there is no need to consult universal history: ask yourself, if you are a man and have ever lived even in some degree. As for my own personal opinion, I find it somehow unseemly to love only well-being. Whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, smashing things is also sometimes very pleasant.

Doesn’t his passionate love for destruction and chaos (and nobody can deny that he is sometimes devoted to them; that is a fact), arise from his instinctive fear of attaining his goal and completing the building he is erecting? For all you know, perhaps it is only from a distance that he likes the building, and from close to he doesn’t like it at all; perhaps he only likes building it, not living in it

I even think that the best definition of man is: a creature that has two legs and no sense of gratitude.

Tell me, who was it who first declared, proclaiming it to the whole world, that a man does evil only because he does not know his real interests, and if he is enlightened and has his eyes opened to his own best and normal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuous and noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and since it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests, consequently he will inevitably, so to speak, begin to do good. Oh, what a baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child!

They are stupid, I won’t deny that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid, how can you tell?

despair can hold the most intense sorts of pleasure when one is strongly conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.

Let me explain: the pleasure came precisely from being too clearly aware of your own degradation; from the feeling of having gone to the uttermost limits; that it was vile, but it could not have been otherwise; that you could not escape, you could never make yourself into a different person; that even if enough faith and time remained for you to make yourself into something different, you probably wouldn’t want to change yourself; and even if you did want to, you wouldn’t do anything because, after all, perhaps it wasn’t worth while to change.