Every man has reminiscences that he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind that he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things that a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. The more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.

From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, translated by Constance Garnett, Dublin: Roads, 2013 (first published in 1864), p. 47.