Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I smiled in my weakness.”

— Osamu Dazai

52. “Each day I deceived myself, unlike you who could never deceive yourself. Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of.”

— Osamu Dazai

53. “People depend on death to be complete. While alive, they are all incomplete.”

— Osamu Dazai

54. “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

55. “What is society but an individual?”

— Osamu Dazai

56. “I yearned for everything long gone.”

— Osamu Dazai

57. “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

58. “If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose.”

— Osamu Dazai

59. “God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?”

— Osamu Dazai

60. “There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.”

— Osamu Dazai

61. “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

62. “I have no choice. I am a person with no reason to live. I know my lot. Yes, it would be great to die one day sooner.”

— Osamu Dazai

63. “Labeled a delinquent. That’s the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.”

— Osamu Dazai

64. “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.”

— Osamu Dazai

65. “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

66. “We all live a sheet of paper away from death, so we shouldn’t be surprised by death.”

— Osamu Dazai

67. “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

68. “I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face – no, that’s not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk.”

— Osamu Dazai

69. “My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.”

— Osamu Dazai

70. “If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.”

— Osamu Dazai

71. “But people almost never say, “Die!“, Paltry prudent, hypocrites.”

— Osamu Dazai

72. “Am I what they call an egoist? Or am I the opposite, a man of excessively weak spirit? I really don’t know myself, but since I seem in either case to be a mass of vices, I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.”

— Osamu Dazai

73. “When I looked up ‘rococo’ in the dictionary a while back it was defined as ‘an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and the gorgeous, but lacking substance’, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It was so perfect. How could anything beautiful have ‘substance’ anyway? Pure beauty is always without meaning or morality.”

— Osamu Dazai

74. “These clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth.”

— Osamu Dazai

75. “People do not necessarily think and consider in a prescribed way before choosing the path they’ll walk. For the most part they simply wander, at some point, into a different meadow.”

— Osamu Dazai

76. “People have told me, really more times that 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.”

— Osamu Dazai

77. “Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret.”

— Osamu Dazai

78. “Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.”

— Osamu Dazai

79. “The smile of one flower permeates those who live next to death more than the problem of life and death.”

— Osamu Dazai

80. “Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, “Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don’t eat, they die.”

— Osamu Dazai

81. “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

82. “Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.”

— Osamu Dazai

83. “Thirty. “Something of the maiden’s fragrance lingers with a woman until she is twenty-nine, but nothing is left about the body of the woman of thirty years.”

— Osamu Dazai

84. “As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much I remain outside their lives.”

— Osamu Dazai

85. “My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people.”

— Osamu Dazai

86. “The true substance of love lies in the act of howling words of love with a desperation of a man jumping into the high seas.”

— Osamu Dazai

87. “I must go on living. And, though it may be childish of me, I can’t go on in simple compliance. From now on I must struggle with the world. I thought that Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive – those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.”

— Osamu Dazai

88. “It’s his father’s fault,” she said unemotionally. “The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk – no, even though he did drink – he was a good boy, an angel.”

— Osamu Dazai

89. “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

90. “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

91. “In the present world, the most beautiful thing is a victim.”

— Osamu Dazai

92. “Mornings are grey. Always the same. Absolutely empty.”

— Osamu Dazai

93. “We have a vague notion of the best place we should go, or the beautiful places we should like to see, or the kinds of places that would make us grow as a person. We yearn for a good life. We have real hopes and ambitions. We feel impatient for an unshakable faith that we can rely on. But it would require considerable effort to express such things in our typical life as a girl.”

— Osamu Dazai

94. “That was a really rare event. I don’t think It’s an exaggeration to say that It was the one and only time in my life that I refused something offered to me. My unhappiness was the happiness of a person who could not say no. I had been intimidated by the fear that if I declined something offered me, a yawning crevice would open between the other person’s heart and myself which could never be mended through all eternity.”

— Osamu Dazai

95. “Young men, if ever the one you love bursts out laughing the moment she sees you, you are to be congratulated.”

— Osamu Dazai

96. “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

97. “A mere smile can determine a woman’s fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.”

— Osamu Dazai

98. “She must be unhappy too. Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.”

— Osamu Dazai

99. “I think humanity is universal love and no one should be banished. The natural love of humanity is not to be forgotten under any circumstances.”

— Osamu Dazai

100. “The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can’t bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.”

— Osamu Dazai