Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.”

— Osamu Dazai

Featured in: Sad Quotes

2. “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

Featured in: Sad Quotes About Life, Depression Quotes

3. “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

4. “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

5. “Last year nothing happened The year before nothing happened And the year before that nothing happened.”

— Osamu Dazai

6. “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

7. “A true artist is an ugly man.”

— Osamu Dazai

8. “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

9. “At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.”

— Osamu Dazai

10. “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

11. “I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.”

— Osamu Dazai

12. “Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.”

— Osamu Dazai

13. “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

14. “The weak fear happiness itself.”

— Osamu Dazai

15. “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

16. “What uneasiness lies in being loved.”

— Osamu Dazai

17. “It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.”

— Osamu Dazai

18. “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. “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

20. “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

21. “The real things are apt to be deviant.”

— Osamu Dazai

22. “To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist’s point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.”

— Osamu Dazai

23. “And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn’t know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.”

— Osamu Dazai

24. “Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.”

— Osamu Dazai

25. “The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like – no thanks.”

— Osamu Dazai

26. “Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.”

— Osamu Dazai

27. “When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.”

— Osamu Dazai

28. “I thought, “I want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leaves – it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.”

— Osamu Dazai

29. “I wonder if I have ever actually been happy. People have told me, really more times than I can remember, ever since I was a small boy, how lucky I was, but I have always felt as if I were suffering in hell. It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.”

— Osamu Dazai

30. “I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.”

— Osamu Dazai

31. “A good book is always good, no matter how many times you’ve already read it.”

— Osamu Dazai

32. “Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.”

— Osamu Dazai

33. “After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.”

— Osamu Dazai

34. “Masks in one layer after another – as many as ten or twenty – had fastened themselves upon me, and I could no longer tell how sad any one of them really was.”

— Osamu Dazai

35. “I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.”

— Osamu Dazai

36. “Living itself is the source of sin.”

— Osamu Dazai

37. “Disqualified as a human beings. I had now ceased utterly to be a human beings.”

— Osamu Dazai

38. “I should have died sooner. But there was one thing: Mama’s love. When I thought of that I couldn’t die. It’s true, as I have said, that just as man has the right to live as he chooses, he has the right to die when he pleases, and yet as long as my mother remained alive, I felt that the right to death would have to be left in abeyance, for to exercise it would have meant killing her too.”

— Osamu Dazai

39. “Real thought takes courage more than intelligence.”

— Osamu Dazai

40. “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

41. “I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.”

— Osamu Dazai

42. “Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.”

— Osamu Dazai

43. “When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a “ withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool.” I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.”

— Osamu Dazai

44. “A sensation of helplessness, as if it were utterly impossible to go on living. Painful waves beat relentlessly on my heart, as after a thunderstorm the white clouds frantically scud across the sky. A terrible emotion – shall I call it an apprehension – wrings my heart only to release it, makes my pulse falter, and chokes my breath. At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.”

— Osamu Dazai

45. “What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?”

— Osamu Dazai

46. “I yearned for everything long gone.”

— Osamu Dazai

47. “The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.”

— Osamu Dazai

48. “Learning is a another name of vanity, It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.”

— Osamu Dazai

49. “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

50. “Am I wrong in thinking that these people have become such complete egoists and are so convinced of the normality of their way of life that they have never once doubted themselves?”

— Osamu Dazai