Notes from Underground Quotes

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

...the laws of nature have continually all my life offended me more than anything.

Notes from Underground

I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell y...

Notes from Underground

I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace. Is the world to go to pot, or am I to go without my tea? I say that the world may go to pot for me so long as I always get my tea. Did you know ...

Notes from Underground

However, do you know what? I am convinced that fellows like me who live in dark cellars must be kept under restraint. They may be able to live in their dark cellars for forty years and never open their mouths, but the moment they get into the light o...

Notes from Underground

It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave

Notes from Underground

I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don't know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don't treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors...

Notes from Underground

...there is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason.

Notes from Underground

For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.

Notes from Underground

Yet, I didn't understand that she was intentionally disguising her feelings with sarcasm; that was usually the last resort of people who are timid and chaste of heart, whose souls have been coarsely and impudently invaded; and who, until the last mom...

Notes from Underground

There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as...

Notes from Underground

I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.

Notes from Underground

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?

Notes from Underground

I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.

Notes from Underground

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.

Notes from Underground