Top 280 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “You see, Take-san loves you, Skylark. That’s why she cried,” she said and squeezed even harder.”

— Osamu Dazai

202. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

204. “Bagaimanapun kau bisa meyakini satu hal: seorang lelaki musti berpura-pura demi meneruskan hidup.”

— Osamu Dazai

205. “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

206. “I entered this Health Dojo because the war ended and life suddenly became precious.”

— Osamu Dazai

207. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

209. “Is this what all you refined gentlemen are like – wishing and pining and never acting?”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

212. “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

213. “Around that time, I lost interest in college. I could only see blackness.”

— Osamu Dazai

214. “I slept quietly so that I would breathe without coughing, and felt a curious indifference. I even felt like I had been waiting for that night for a long time. The words “heart’s desire” came to mind.”

— Osamu Dazai

215. “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

216. “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

217. “But the planes have a new elegant shape. Not one unnecessary ornament.” “Yes,” said Mabo softly and watched the planes fly off through the sky with a childlike innocence. “A form with no unneeded ornaments is nice.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

219. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

228. “What superficiality – and what stupidity – there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them. In other words, they seemed not to rely in the least on the misconceptions of others.”

— Osamu Dazai

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.”

— Osamu Dazai

232. “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

233. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

240. “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

241. “A stranger full of secrets.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

243. “I was plagued by a heavy sense of loss, as if my heart had become empty.”

— Osamu Dazai

244. “Each individual has his own way of living. Can we not learn to respect one another’s chosen way? One makes every effort to live in a dignified and proper manner, without harming anyone else, yet people will carp and cavil and try to tear one down.”

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

246. “Me? Are you kidding? I’m going to Hell.”

— Osamu Dazai

247. “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

248. “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

249. “All men are alike... I believe that all of the so-called “anxiety of the age” – men frightened by one another, every known principle violated, effort mocked, happiness denied, beauty defiled, honor dragged down – originates in this one incredible expression.”

— Osamu Dazai

250. “No less than myself, though in a different way, he was entirely removed from the activities of the human beings of the world. We were of one species if only in that we were both disoriented.”

— Osamu Dazai