Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “My surroundings are becoming as bright as I am. Until now, usually, haven’t the places we appeared automatically become bright and splendid?”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

203. “The only thing people like you can see is other people’s faults, and you’re oblivious to the horror in your own hearts. You people terrify me.”

— Osamu Dazai

204. “Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

207. “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

208. “Ada sebuah kisah tentang bagaimana pada suatu pagi musim semi ketika matahari cerah menyinari dedahanan prem di mana dua atau tiga kembang mekar terdapat seorang pelajar Heidelberg bergelantungan di sana, mati.”

— Osamu Dazai

209. “I believed that the gloom of our daily lives could not be dispelled, no matter how much one declaimed about society and politics.”

— Osamu Dazai

210. “Somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the “heaviness of blood” or perhaps the “solidity of human life” – it has not even a bird’s weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling.”

— Osamu Dazai

211. “My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death.”

— Osamu Dazai

212. “What the tanuki doesn’t realize is that people who affect to believe all our nonsense often harbor evil and insidious plots in their hearts.”

— Osamu Dazai

213. “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

214. “One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add to every situation -a quality which has made people call me at times a liar- but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage;.”

— Osamu Dazai

215. “I wept bitterly, crying aloud. I could have wept on and on, interminably.”

— Osamu Dazai

216. “Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.”

— Osamu Dazai

217. “A mere smile can determine a woman’s fate.”

— Osamu Dazai

218. “I’m told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women.”

— Osamu Dazai

219. “I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable I was in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed.”

— Osamu Dazai

220. “But in my softness I find peace, however fleeting.”

— Osamu Dazai

221. “Before anyone realized it, I had become an accomplished clown.”

— Osamu Dazai

222. “I should like to record that as I manipulated the peeling lacquer chopsticks to eat my jelly, I felt unbearably lonely.”

— Osamu Dazai

223. “The five brothers and sisters, and I myself, have gradually grown more adult, more polite, more guarded – have become, in short, “members of society” – and when we do on occasion meet, it’s not the least bit fun.”

— Osamu Dazai

224. “To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.”

— Osamu Dazai

225. “Perhaps, then, most lovers of drink are not what we today would call egoists but rather guardians of the sort of generous spirit that inspires all of us to toast, at times, our neighbor’s happiness. We do this because we want to drink, yes, but if our neighbor gets drunk along with us, our pleasure is double.”

— Osamu Dazai

226. “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. And the more nervous they are -the quicker to take fright- the more violent they pray that every storm will be...”

— Osamu Dazai

227. “That “purity of youth” often turns out, as in the case of this rabbit, to be a frenzied dance – an indecipherable, sensual mishmash that casually combines murderous hatred with self-intoxication.”

— Osamu Dazai

228. “Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it’s probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.”

— Osamu Dazai

229. “You miss her, don’t you?” “Yes.”

— Osamu Dazai

230. “As long as you have the desire to be somebody, you will not fall into decadence. And you don’t have that kind of goal. You are passionate about wanting to see what it is like to fail.”

— Osamu Dazai

231. “For some reason, filters on cigarettes seem dirty to me. If you were going to smoke, then it had to be unfiltered. Smoking those Shikishimas throws a person’s whole character into question.”

— Osamu Dazai

232. “God killed me, and only after He had made me into someone entirely different from the person I had been, did he call me back to life.”

— Osamu Dazai

233. “I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage; it was rather that I had a strangulating fear of that cataclysmic change in the atmosphere the instant the flow of a conversation flagged, and even when I knew that it would later turn to my disadvantage, I frequently felt obliged to add, almost inadvertently, my word of embellishment, out of a desire to please born of my usual desperate mania for service.”

— Osamu Dazai

234. “Poverty and scholarship have always gone hand in hand, it seems, and one can’t help but wonder why that might be.”

— Osamu Dazai

235. “I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it.”

— Osamu Dazai

236. “If all you’ve got is just enough talent to get along, sooner or later you’ll betray yourself.”

— Osamu Dazai

237. “I hope for a revolution in ethics and morals. Then, my obsequiousness and this need to plod through life according to others’ expectations would simply dissolve.”

— Osamu Dazai

238. “I’m the fool who doesn’t know the limits of stupidity.”

— Osamu Dazai

239. “There was in his nature a tendency to display a taste for fairness and justice – not the “fairness and justice” that politicians are forever carrying on about, but fairness and justice in the true, original sense of the words. As a consequence, the people of Mishima regarded him as a troublemaker and kept their distance.”

— Osamu Dazai

240. “Drinkers tend to say inane and obnoxious things when they’re drunk, but most of them are in fact harmless, innocent souls like this.”

— Osamu Dazai

241. “I also like to take my glasses off and look at people. The faces around me, all of them, seem kind and pretty and smiling. What’s more, when my glasses are off, I don’t ever think about arguing with anyone at all, nor do I feel the need to make snide remarks. All I do is just blankly stare in silence.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

243. “Extremely tragic is a good description of you.”

— Osamu Dazai

244. “I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.”

— Osamu Dazai

245. “I am happy now. Even if I were to hear the four walls all shriek in anguish, my feeling of happiness would still be at the saturation point. I am so happy I could sneeze.” Mr. Uehara laughed. “But it’s too late now. It’s dusk already.” “It’s morning!” That morning my brother Naoji committed suicide.”

— Osamu Dazai

246. “A stranger full of secrets.”

— Osamu Dazai

247. “Extending discipline for the minority to everyone else at the same time seems particularly cruel. As I grow older, I have begun to understand more and more how ethics taught in school and public mores are two different things. Those who insist on keeping ethics in school look like fools. People think they’re eccentric. They’ll never succeed, they’ll always be penniless.”

— Osamu Dazai

248. “My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no.”

— Osamu Dazai

249. “En mi existencia ya no existe la felicidad o el sufrimiento. Todo pasa.”

— Osamu Dazai

250. “I yearned with such desperation for “freedom” that I became weak and tearful.”

— Osamu Dazai