what is life?

i would just like to share this passage from the overcoat by nikolai gogol.

"The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted;  recounted there in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy;  they said that she beat him;  asked when the wedding was to be;  and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow.  But Akakii Akakievich answered not a word, as though there had been no one before him.  It even had no effect upon his employment: amid all these molestations he never made a single mistake in a letter.

But if the joking became utterly intolerable, as when they jogged his hand, and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim, "Leave me alone!  Why do you insult me?"  And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered.  There was in it a something which moved to pity; so that one young man, lately entered, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of him, suddenly stopped short, as though all had undergone a transformation before him, and presented itself in a different aspect.  Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were well-bred and polite men.  And long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there came to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with the heart-rending words, "Leave me alone!  Why do you insult me?"  And in these penetrating words, other words resounded-- "I am thy brother."  And the poor young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, he shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed in delicate, refined worldliness and, O God! even in that man whom the world acknowledges as honorable and noble."

this passage had such a profound influence on my thought process when i read it.  how many of us have felt this way before?  how many people have found themselves being the ridiculed official?  & yet, how many of us have not stopped someone from being ridiculed when we knew, deep in our hearts, it was wrong?