Notes from the Underground

Quotes and passages from Notes from the Underground:

• … there is no explaining anything by reasoning.
• 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.
• Which is better a cheap happiness or lofty suffering? Tell me then, which is better?
• And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you.
• I agree that two and two make four is an excellent thing; but to give everything its due, two and two make five is also a very fine thing
• I invented a life, so that I should at any rate live.
• I say, let the world perish, if I can always drink my tea.
• But man is a superficial and unseemly creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is fond only of the actual process of achieving his goal rather than the goal itself.
• Try giving us more independence ... we will immediately beg to be taken back under tutelage.