Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.”

— Osamu Dazai

52. “Nevertheless, I still wait for someone. Who on earth am I waiting for, sitting here everyday? For what sort of person? Maybe what I’m waiting for isn’t even a human. I dislike humans. No, I fear them. When I meet someone and indifferently exchange such greetings as ‘How are you?’ or ‘It’s become cold’, greetings I don’t want to make, I somehow get the unpleasant feeling that there is no such horrible liar in the whole world as I, and I wish I were dead.”

— Osamu Dazai

53. “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

54. “I smiled in my weakness.”

— Osamu Dazai

55. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

57. “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

58. “What is society but an individual?”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

60. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

62. “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

63. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

68. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

73. “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

74. “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

75. “It is only too obvious that favoritism inevitably exists: it would have been useless to complain to human beings. So I said nothing of the truth.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

77. “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

78. “I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

81. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

86. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

95. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

97. “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

98. “Long personal experience had taught me that when a woman suddenly bursts into hysterics, the way to restore her sprits is to give her something sweet.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

100. “People talk of “social outcasts.” The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a “social outcast” from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.”

— Osamu Dazai