#underground

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

#belittle #ego #fyodor-dostoyevsky #judgemental #notes-from-underground

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#choice #fyodor-dostoyevsky #life #notes-from-the-underground #reason

To put the point sharply: If an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand. ↗

— Albert Maltz

#equally #french #friend #gestapo #i

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

#fyodor-dostoyevsky #notes-from-the-underground #slave #age

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above. ↗

— Cyril Connolly

#above #artist #dark #day #falls

It doesn't really seem any different anywhere. I'd say it seems like we're biggest in Australia. It's just that we've always been this underground band and for some reason in the last month has been starting to go overground. ↗

— Jon Crosby

#any #anywhere #australia #band #been

I do a cover of a Velvet Underground song, and they were one of the most important bands, for me. ↗

— Martin Gore

#cover #i #i do #important #me

I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other. ↗

— Bill Griffith

#art school #brooklyn #call #comics #east

I didn't plan to be a politician. The founder of our country, David Ben-Gurion, called me from the kibbutz to serve in the underground. We were short of manpower, short of arms. I was 24 years old. I was supposed to serve my country for one or two years. I am 89 years old this year, and I keep going. ↗

— Shimon Peres

#arms #called #country #david #founder

Most of these experiments required the reduction of the cosmic ray muon flux in order to be successful, and the group necessarily became expert in the operation of deep underground laboratories. ↗

— Frederick Reines

#cosmic #deep #experiments #expert #flux