Notes From Underground Quotes & Sayings

He had heard it sure enough, wailing underground in clubs and speakeasies, all through Prohibition, hot, polyphonic, toe-tapping, full of syncopated rhythms and bent, naughty notes - perfect for small and secret spaces. — Nicole Mones

If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The poor girl ws keeping that student's letter as a precious treasure, and had run to fetch it, her only treasure, because she did not want me to go away without knowing that she, too, was honestly and genuinely loved; that she, too, was addressed respectfully. No doubt that letter was destined to lie in her box and lead to nothing. But none the less, I am certain that she would keep it all her life as a precious treasure, as her pride and justification, and now at such a minute she had thought of that letter and brought it with naive pride to raise herself in my eyes that I might see, that I, too, might think well of her. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Don't you see, gentlemen? Reason is a fine thing, there's no question about it, but reason is only reason and only satisfies man's rational faculties, whereas desire is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is of the whole of human life, along with reason and all our head-scratching ... not just the extraction of a square root. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Leadership is a choice. It's not a rank, it's a choice. I know many people who are at the top of their organization who have authority. We have to do what they say because they have authority over us. But they're not leaders. We wouldn't follow them. They may be at the top of the company but they're not leaders. — Simon Sinek

A decent, educated man cannot afford the luxury of vanity without being exceedingly exacting with himself and without occasionally despising himself to the point of hatred. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To wake up one morning and feel that I was a last a grown-up person, emptied of resentment, vengeful thoughts and other wasteful childish emotions. To find myself, in other words, an adult.
Truman Capote — Truman Capote

The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You are my everlasting home. Don't you ever be afraid. I am enough. We are enough. — Sue Monk Kidd

We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves — Robert Cialdini

No prize , however great can justify an ounce of self deception or a small departure of the ugly facts. ( Notes from Underground) — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstance, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And with love one can live even without happiness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men
men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from Underground. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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 that, or not? Well, anyway, I know that I am a blackguard, a scoundrel, an egoist, a sluggard. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life. — Charles Stross

No doubt Carter would describe the underground city in excruciating detail, with exact measurements of each room, boring history on every statue and hieroglyph, and background notes on the construction of the magical headquarters of the House of Life.
I will spare you that pain.
It's big. It's full of magic. It's underground.
There. Sorted. — Rick Riordan

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won't break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The moon in all her immaculate purity hung in the sky, laughing at this world of dust. She congratulated me for my carefully considered maneuvers and invited me to share in her eternal solitude. — Shan Sa

I'm now asking an idle question of my own: which is better
cheap happiness, or lofty suffering? Well, which is better? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is no explaining anything by reasoning and so it is useless to reason. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

An athlete learns how to hold her breath, but that doesn't work in singing. You have to learn to relax. — Cathy Rigby

I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness - a real thorough-going illness. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I guess I haven't gotten over being lost, a wandering gypsy. — Neil Diamond

But a man is a frivolous and incongruous creature, and perhaps, like a chess player, loves the process of the game, not the end of it. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Someone once said that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. Clark now had the best magic act in Silicon Valley. The best magic act attracted many of the best engineers. In the Valley it often did. The Valley had given engineers a place where they could make their living outside the enormous gray corporations that expected them to conform. It — Michael Lewis

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. — David Foster Wallace

NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I could not even imagine any place of secondary importance for myself, and for that very reason I quite contentedly occupied the most insignificant one in real life. Either a hero or dirt - there was no middle way. That turned out to be my undoing, for while wallowing in dirt I consoled myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero overlaid the dirt: an ordinary mortal, as it were, was ashamed to wallow in dirt, but a hero was too exalted a person to be entirely covered in dirt, and hence I could wallow in dirt with an easy conscience. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Such was the mistrust of the official line, so heavy was the spin, that with any new piece of information you learned to do a kind of mental arithmetic whereby you divided the information given by the speaker's rank, multiplied by his or her time in-country, and subtracted based on the number of miles the speaker was distant from the fighting.

From The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground — David J. Morris