Top 100 Osamu Dazai Quotes
#1. Never could think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security. I could sleep soundly.
Osamu Dazai
#2. The wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection
Osamu Dazai
#4. The more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them - a process which eventually compelled me to run away from everybody.
Osamu Dazai
#5. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai
#6. I am sure that the reason why I wept and stormed as if I had gone off my head was that the combination of physical exhaustion and my unhappiness had made me hate and resent everything.
Osamu Dazai
#7. If he wears a tag, doesn't that make him harmless? It sounds rather sweet, like a kitten with a bell around its neck. A dissolute character without a tag is what frightens me.
Osamu Dazai
#9. I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in His love, only in His punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one's head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.
Osamu Dazai
#10. Then what's a synonym for woman?" "Entrails." "You're not very poetic, are you? Well, then, what's the antonym for entrails?" "Milk.
Osamu Dazai
#11. I have frantically played the clown in order to distangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.
Osamu Dazai
#12. Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
Osamu Dazai
#13. Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
Everything passes.
That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell.
Everything passes.
Osamu Dazai
#14. I also have the impression that many women have been able, instinctively, to sniff out this loneliness of mine, which I confided to no one, and this in later years was to become one of the causes of my being taken advantage of.
Osamu Dazai
#15. Logic, inevitably, is the love of logic. It is not the love for living human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#16. The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness
Osamu Dazai
#17. Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer "Nothing." The thought went through my mind that it didn't make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.
Osamu Dazai
#19. All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? - I don't know.
Osamu Dazai
#20. At this moment, as I stood on the verge of tears, the words "realism" and "romanticism" welled up within me. I have no sense of realism. And that this very fact might be what permits me to go on living sends cold chills through my whole body.
Osamu Dazai
#21. I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.
Osamu Dazai
#22. I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.
Osamu Dazai
#23. Most people would take me for over forty.
Osamu Dazai
#24. But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.
Osamu Dazai
#25. To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.
Osamu Dazai
#26. Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.
Osamu Dazai
#27. I'm going to paint too. I'm going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell.
Osamu Dazai
#28. Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.
Osamu Dazai
#29. A science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious.
Osamu Dazai
#30. This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.
Osamu Dazai
#31. Are "people in the world", I wonder, creatures that spend their whole lives greeting each other in stiff, formal patterns, being cautious about each other, then growing tired of each other? I hate meeting people.
Osamu Dazai
#32. What is society but an individual? [ ... ] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.
Osamu Dazai
#33. When I liked something I tasted it hesitantly, furtively, as though it were extremely bitter.
Osamu Dazai
#34. Most women have only to lay eyes on you to want to be doing something for you so badly they can't stand it ... You're always so timid and yet you're funny ... Sometimes you get terribly lonesome and depressed, but that only makes a woman's heart itch all the more for you.
Osamu Dazai
#35. As for love ... no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
Osamu Dazai
#36. The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people.
Osamu Dazai
#37. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.
Osamu Dazai
#38. Mornings are grey. Always the same. Absolutely empty.
Osamu Dazai
#39. I have one request to make of you, which embarrasses me very much. You remember the hemp kimono of Mother's which you altered so that I could wear it next summer? Please put it in my coffin. I wanted to wear it.
Osamu Dazai
#40. Not long ago I learned from a certain person in considerable detail about the worthlessness of your character. All the same, it is you who have given me strength, you who have put the rainbow of revolution in my breast. It is you who have given an object to my life.
Osamu Dazai
#41. In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears.
Osamu Dazai
#42. I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites!
Osamu Dazai
#43. A mere smile can determine a woman's fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.
Osamu Dazai
#44. I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.
Osamu Dazai
#46. Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man's got to fake just to stay alive.
Osamu Dazai
#47. I am afraid because I can so clearly foresee my own life rotting away of itself, like a leaf that rots without falling, while I pursue my round of existence from day to day.
Osamu Dazai
#48. It isn't that I dislike artists, but I can't stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.
Osamu Dazai
#49. Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it's true.
Osamu Dazai
#51. I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.
Osamu Dazai
#52. Show me what you've written, I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.
Osamu Dazai
#54. The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#56. There's something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.
Osamu Dazai
#57. I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.
Osamu Dazai
#58. I want to spend my time with people who don't look to be respected. But such good people won't want to spend their time with me.
Osamu Dazai
#59. Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.
Osamu Dazai
#60. I have never derived the least joy out of amusements. Perhaps that is a sign of the impotence of pleasure. I ran riot and threw myself into wild diversions out of the simple desire to escape from my own shadow.
Osamu Dazai
#61. In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.
Osamu Dazai
#62. He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.
Osamu Dazai
#63. A good book is always good, no matter how many times you've already read it.
Osamu Dazai
#64. I despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom I associated for that sole purpose.
Osamu Dazai
#65. The color of this sky, what would you call it? Rose? Flame? Iridescent? The color of angel's wings? Or a huge temple? No, it is none of these things. It is much more sublime.
Osamu Dazai
#66. When you've got the devil's own luck, you're immune from the usual run of disasters. Such people must be utilized.
Osamu Dazai
#67. In my case such an expression as 'to be fallen for' or even 'to be loved' is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was 'looked after.
Osamu Dazai
#68. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.
Osamu Dazai
#69. I have never been able to
meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful
smiles, the buffoonery of defeat.
Osamu Dazai
#70. I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.
I want money. Unless I have it ...
In my sleep, a natural death!
Osamu Dazai
#71. Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance.
Osamu Dazai
#72. Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.
Osamu Dazai
#73. The real things are apt to be deviant.
Osamu Dazai
#74. The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.
Osamu Dazai
#75. Disqualified as a human beings. I had now ceased utterly to be a human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#76. My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.
Osamu Dazai
#77. Humanity? Don't be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness.
Osamu Dazai
#78. If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?
Osamu Dazai
#79. I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again.
Osamu Dazai
#80. I hope I meet lots of people with lovely eyes.
Osamu Dazai
#82. My definition of a "respected" man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people
Osamu Dazai
#83. As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn't matter how, I'll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won't mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.
Osamu Dazai
#84. It is painful for the plant which is myself to live in the atmosphere and light of this world. Somewhere an element is lacking which would permit me to continue.
Osamu Dazai
#85. Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves. If that is what the world calls friendship, the relations between Horiki and myself were undoubtedly those of friendship.
Osamu Dazai
#86. For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.
Osamu Dazai
#87. I am choking in the suffocating foul air of the harbor. I want to hoist my sails in the open sea, even though a tempest may be blowing. Furled sails are always dirty. Those who would deride me are so many furled sails. They can do nothing.
Osamu Dazai
#88. [ ... ] Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats.
Osamu Dazai
#89. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions altogether occupy a bare one per cent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine per cent is just living in waiting.
Osamu Dazai
#90. When you find yourself looking ridiculous, reasoning isn't worth a damn.
Osamu Dazai
#91. Forgive me. I didn't mean to kill you, Polonius. The blade slipped out of the sheath, and it struck you.
Osamu Dazai
#92. Even if Mary gives birth to a child who is not her husband's, if she has a shining pride, they become a holy mother and child.
Osamu Dazai
#93. I'm going somewhere where there aren't any women.
Osamu Dazai
#94. The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like - no thanks.
Osamu Dazai
#95. Labeled a delinquent. That's the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.
Osamu Dazai
#96. Last year nothing happened
The year before nothing happened
And the year before that nothing
happened.
Osamu Dazai
#97. I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.
Osamu Dazai
#98. Is it painful to be the person who waits? Or is it more painful to be the person who makes others wait? Either way, there's no need to wait anymore. That's what is most painful. - Osamu Dazai
Osamu Dazai
#99. It occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in hellish dread of the "realities of life" as led by human beings.
Osamu Dazai
#100. Any connoisseur knows you've got to be drunk to really enjoy a good romance.
Osamu Dazai
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
