And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive—in other words, only what is conducive to welfare—is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides wellbeing? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as wellbeing? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for wellbeing seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.

From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, translated by Constance Garnett, Dublin: Roads, 2013 (first published in 1864), p. 42.