Starting_from_zed

“Either to be a hero or to grovel in the mud - there was nothing between. That was my ruin, for when I was in the mud I comforted myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, and the hero was a cloak for the mud: for an ordinary man it was shameful to defile himself, but a hero was too lofty to be utterly defiled, and so he might defile himself.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, The Double and Other Stories