This is a great book with great commentary on the loathsome human condition, that still applies to today’s individual. Before I share my favourite highlights for this book, I must say that this is a vile book that slaps in the face more than once. I turned some pages with eager repugnance - a feeling I never assumed possible from a book. Here is a confession from the author, which serves as a better disclaimer to my highlights:

“Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are all divorced from life, we are all cripples, every one of us, more or less. We are so divorced from it that we feel at once a sort of loathing for real life, and so cannot bear to be reminded of it.”

I’d also add this note made towards the end of the book by the awesome translators at Project Gutenberg, from where this book was sourced.

“The notes of the paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.”

Favourite Highlights

• Though, after all, everyone does do that; people do pride themselves on their diseases.
• That is, the man of acute consciousness, who has come, of course, not out of the lap of nature but out of a retorty (this is almost mysticism, gentlemen, but I suspect this, too), this retort-made man is sometimes so nonplussed in the presence of his antithesis that with all his exaggerated consciousness he genuinely thinks of himself as a mouse and not a man.
• But it is just in that cold, abominable half despair, half belief, in that conscious burying oneself alive for greed in the underworld for forty years, in that acutely recognised and yet partly doubtful hopelessness of one’s position, in that fever of oscillations, of resolutions determined for ever and repented of again a minute later - that the savour of that strange enjoyment of which I have spoken lies.
• But of course that is because I do not respect myself. Can a man of perception respect himself at all?
• Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vaxatious 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?
• The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations - and absolutely nothing more.
• Have you noticed that it is the most civilised gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers.
• In any case civilisation has made mankind if not more bloodthrisrty, 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.
• How do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
• Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn).
• I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity, perpetual - from the days of the Flood to the Schleswig-Holstein period. Moral obliquity and consequently lack of good sense is due to no other cause than moral obliquity. Put it to the test and cast your eyes upon the history of mankind.
• Man is preeminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering - that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, wherever they may lead.
• I will not accept as the crown of my desires a block of buildings with tenements for the poor on a lease of a thousand years, and perhaps, with a sign-board of a dentist hanging out. Destroy my desires, eradicate my ideals, show me something better, and I will follow you. You will say, perhaps, that it is not worth your trouble; but in that case I can give you the same answer. We are discussing things seriously; but if you won’t deign to give me your attention, I will drop your acquaintance. I can retreat into my underground hole.
• 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.
• Every decent man of our age must be 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 circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. It is the law of nature for all decent people all over the earth. If anyone of them happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted not carried away by that he would show the white feather just the same before something else. That is how it invariably and inevitably ends. Only donkeys and mules are valiant, and they only till they are pushed up to the wall. It is not worthwhile to pay attention to them for they really are of no consequence.
• Once, indeed, I did have a friend. But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him; I tried to instil into him a contempt for his surroundings; I required of him a disdainful and complete break with those surroundings. I frightened him with my passionate affection; I reduced him to tears, to hysterics. He was a simple and devoted soul; but when he devoted himself to me entirely I began to hate him immediately and repulsed him - as though all I needed him for was to win a victory over him, to subjugate him and nothing else.
• A man is no example for a woman. It’s a different thing. I may degrade and defile myself, but I am not anyone’s slave. I come and go, and that’s an end of it. I shake it off, and I am a different man. But you are a slave from the start.
• If once there has been love, if they have been married for love, why should love pass away? Surely once can keep it! It is rare that one cannot keep it.
• She was hiding her feelings under irony, that this is usually the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded, and that their pride makes them refuse to surrender till the last moment and shrink from giving expression to their feelings before you.
• 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 conquered myself, however, and raised my head; I had to do so sooner or later … and I am convinced to this day that it was just because I was ashamed to look at her that another feeling was suddenly kindled and flamed up in my heart … a feeling of mastery and possession.
• I have never in my life been able to imagine any other sort of love, and have nowadays come to the point of sometimes thinking that love really consists in the right - freely given by the beloved object - to tyrannise over her.
• Real life oppressed me with its novelty so much that I could hardly breathe.
• Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost an 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.