“Shower [a man] with all earthly blessings, drown him in happiness totally up to his head, so much so that only little bubbles leap up to the surface of this happiness, as they do on water; give him such economical satisfaction that he would have nothing at all more to do than to sleep, to eat gingerbread and to trouble himself over the ceaselessness of world history – and then, right there, this man, from ingratitude alone, from calumny alone, will do something nasty. He will even risk his gingerbread and will purposely want the most pernicious rubbish, the most uneconomical nonsense, solely in order to mix into all this positive prudence his own pernicious fantastical element. It is exactly this, his fantastic dreams, his most vulgar stupidity, that he will want to hold close to himself for the sole purpose of confirming to himself (as if it were really necessary), that people are still people and not piano keys upon which the laws of nature play with their own hands, threatening to play them so much that it will be impossible to want anything that is not according to the calendar.”
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
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