There is nothing more annoying than to be, for instance, wealthy, of good family, nice-looking, fairly intelligent, and even good-natured, and yet to have no talents, no special faculty, no peculiarity even, not one idea of one's own, to be precisely 'like other people'... There is an extraordinary multitude of such people in the world, far more than appears.
This bland multitude are subdivided by their intelligence, "some of limited intelligence, some much cleverer":
Nothing is easier for 'ordinary' people of limited intelligence than to imagine themselves exceptional and original and to revel in that delusion without the slightest misgiving... Some have only to meet with some idea by hearsay, or to read some stray page, to believe at once that it is their own opinion and has sprung spontaneously from their own brain. The impudence of simplicity, if one may so express it, is amazing in such cases.. this unhesitating confidence of the stupid man in himself and his talents...
The second category has it much tougher:
[Gavril Ardalionovitch] belonged to the class of the 'much cleverer' people, though he was infected from head to foot with the desire for originality. But that class... is far less happy than the first; for the clever 'commonplace' man, even if he occasionally or even always fancies himself a man of genius or originality, yet preserves the worm of doubt gnawing in his heart, which in some cases drives the clever man to utter despair... His passionate craving to distinguish himself sometimes led him to the brink of most ill-conceived actions, but our hero was always at the last moment too sensible to take the final plunge.
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