Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “There’s nothing wrong in being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive?”

— Osamu Dazai

152. “Just as a man has the right to live, he ought also to have the right to die.”

— Osamu Dazai

153. “Why is physical love bad and spiritual love good? I don’t understand. I can’t help feeling that they are the same. I would like to boast that I am she who could destroy her body and soul in Gehenna for the sake of a love, for the sake of a passion she could not understand, or for the sake of the sorrow they engendered.”

— Osamu Dazai

154. “How cruel of you. What part of what you see here is carefree? If only you could understand the sadness of the ones who grow the delicate flowers of buffoonery, protecting them from but the slightest gust of wind and always on the verge of despair!”

— Osamu Dazai

155. “It seems that when people are in a state of euphoria, they don’t always notice the suffering of others.”

— Osamu Dazai

156. “From here it’s hundreds of miles to home.”

— Osamu Dazai

157. “During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.”

— Osamu Dazai

158. “The source of our laughter is the small stone that tumbled into a corner of Pandora’s box.”

— Osamu Dazai

159. “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

160. “Most drinkers are lonely men, isolated in their own homes. To ask whether they drink because they’re isolated or isolated because the rest of the family disapprove of their drinking would be like clapping and trying to decide which hand made the sound – it can only lead to a lot of vain quibbling.”

— Osamu Dazai

161. “Human beings are like that, though. They’ll do the most unbelievably cruel things when you least expect it.”

— Osamu Dazai

162. “My heart had melted into something akin to a sensation of happiness, peace of mind one might even say, at the realization that I had now reached the very bottom of agony.”

— Osamu Dazai

163. “If I were to experience failure upon failure day after day – nothing but total embarrassment – then perhaps I’d develop some semblance of dignity as a result. But no, I would somehow illogically twist even such failures, gloss over them smoothly, so that it would seem like they had a perfectly good theory behind them. And I would have no qualms about putting on a desperate show to do so.”

— Osamu Dazai

164. “Now, I will make better use of my body and be useful by increasing food production just a little, then I will bid farewell to this world. It would be good to lighten the burden on this country. That is my path to best serve my country as a useless invalid. I want to die soon.”

— Osamu Dazai

165. “As a child I had absolutely no notion of what others, even members of my own family, might be suffering or what they were thinking. I was aware only of my own unspeakable fears and embarrassments. Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown, a child who never spoke a single truthful word.”

— Osamu Dazai

166. “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

167. “The more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them.”

— Osamu Dazai

168. “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

169. “The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.”

— Osamu Dazai

170. “They called me by my first name and bought me drinks.”

— Osamu Dazai

171. “There’s something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.”

— Osamu Dazai

172. “I was a petal quivering in the slightest breeze, about to fall any moment. Even the slightest insult made me think of dying.”

— Osamu Dazai

173. “Not long afterwards we were married. The joy I obtained as a result of this action was not necessarily great or savage, but the suffering which ensued was staggering – so far surpassing what I had imagined that even describing it as “horrendous” would not quite cover it. 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 single then-and-there decision.”

— Osamu Dazai

174. “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

175. “Around that time, I lost interest in college. I could only see blackness before me, I didn’t know what to do. It was no easy matter to prevent my father from criticizing my loafing around the house and my mother from seeing me as unworthy.”

— Osamu Dazai

176. “I wanted to write only what I wanted to write.”

— Osamu Dazai

177. “If you don’t give a damn what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years – a thousand years – with no difficulty whatsoever.”

— Osamu Dazai

178. “The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people.”

— Osamu Dazai

179. “Forced explanations often end in a distortion of lies.”

— Osamu Dazai

180. “A leader pompously voices his own views without the least hesitation. Do as I say, he proclaims. Then you, as well as your family and your village and your country and the whole world too will be secure. Gesturing grandly, he roars on about how disaster will come from ignoring him. But then, as has happened time after time, his favorite prostitute gives him the cold shoulder, and this makes him cry out desperately for the abolition of her kind.”

— Osamu Dazai

181. “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

182. “The “literary world” was a place I was grateful for, and blessed, I thought, were those who could spend their lives there.”

— Osamu Dazai

183. “Communal living had proved quite impossible for me. It gave me chills just to hear such words as “the ardor of youth” or “youthful pride”: I could not by any stretch of the imagination soak myself in “college spirit.”

— Osamu Dazai

184. “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

185. “After that, there is nothing more to say. We will move straight ahead at the perfect pace, neither too fast nor too slow. Where does this road lead? Perhaps, you should ask a growing vine. The vine may answer. “I don’t know. But I grow toward the sunlight.”

— Osamu Dazai

186. “I drew with extremely excessively depressed emotions, deliberately penning each line, only to earn money for drink.”

— Osamu Dazai

187. “Regardless of the cause, those in charge always seemed to be seeking power and glory for themselves.”

— Osamu Dazai

188. “Just to see all the books lining the shelves would lighten my mood as if by magic. Of course, I didn’t go to bookstores just to read articles on anatomy. I went because any book gave me comfort and solace at the time.”

— Osamu Dazai

189. “In terms of sealing your fate, there’s no difference between turning right on a whim and turning right because you’ve come to some momentous resolve. Either way, it can’t be undone.”

— Osamu Dazai

190. “To deceive someone who trusts you is to enter a hell that can take you to the brink of madness.”

— Osamu Dazai

191. “Of course, I intended to die without telling a soul about my illness. Without anyone knowing, I would secretly deteriorate. Actually, I felt that there was nothing else I could do. I had no alternatives. Shouldn’t I be resolved to die as a peasant in my horribly confused final circumstance? I had no excuses. It was not because life suddenly became precious, but the forced pretense until yesterday had disappeared.”

— Osamu Dazai

192. “Nobody in the world understood our suffering. In time, when we became adults, we might look back on this pain and loneliness as a funny thing, perfectly ordinary, but – but how were we expected to get by, to get through this interminable period of time until that point when we were adults? There was no one to teach us how. Was there nothing to do but leave us alone, like we had the measles? But people died from the measles, or went blind. You couldn’t just leave them alone.”

— Osamu Dazai

193. “Life itself is bound to be dreary if you carry a lot of baggage about.”

— Osamu Dazai

194. “You see, Take-san loves you, Skylark. That’s why she cried,” she said and squeezed even harder.”

— Osamu Dazai

195. “Art cannot order people around. Art dies the moment it acquires authority.”

— Osamu Dazai

196. “To begin with, I believe a fatal contradiction lies between women’s right to vote and lipstick. Those guys usually aren’t popular with the ladies. Without a doubt, this is a plan for revenge.”

— Osamu Dazai

197. “American planes circled the clear blue sky of late fall. We stood in front of the Miyoshino-style building and looked up at them. “They’re flying around in vain.” “Yeah,” Mabo said with a smile.”

— Osamu Dazai

198. “I have suffered much at the hands of human society. Forgive me if I seem overly suspicious.”

— Osamu Dazai

199. “I hated school and never read a textbook. I only read entertaining books.”

— Osamu Dazai

200. “We continued to walk without talking. I thought that from now on I will carefully look at the faces of women I encounter, and to some degree, the innocent, transparent beauty of Mabo will appear in all of their faces. Women have become womanly. But the change is not in the women before the world war. The new womanliness has experienced the suffering of war.”

— Osamu Dazai