Notes from Underground

What can a decent man speak about with the most pleasure?

About himself

So then I too will speak about myself.

Who can take pride in his sicknesses, and swagger about them besides?

Some fatal slops have accumulated around the wretched mouse, some stinking filth consisting of its dubieties, anxieties, and, finally, of the spit raining down on it from the ingenuous figures who stand solemnly around it like judges and dictators, guffawing at it from all their healthy gullets. Of course, nothing remains for it but to wave the whole thing aside with its little paw and, with a smile of feigned contempt, in which it does not believe itself, slip back shamefacedly into its crack.

Nobody knows what and nobody knows who, but in spite of all the uncertainties and stacked decks, it still hurts, and the more uncertain you are, the more it hurts!

You're laughing? I'm very glad. To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone-uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?

No, how is it possible, how is it at all possible for a man to have the slightest respect for himself, if he has presumed to find pleasure even in the very sense of his own humiliation?

Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted I'm a babbler, a harmless irksome babbler, as we all are. But whats to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble-that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky- Notes from Underground (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation)