Top 350 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Adults are thoroughly schooled in this way of seeing, which makes it quite easy for them to empathize with others. Each teardrop is a source of pride. Young people, it’s true, will also sometimes indulge in this kind of trivial emotionality. But if adults acquire this ability only after making compromises with their lives, to put it generously, where do young people pick it up? From junk novels like this one?”

— Osamu Dazai

302. “It’s probably true. There definitely is something wrong with me. I have become petty. I am no good at all. I am pathetic. Out of the blue I nearly cried out at the top of my lungs. Pshaw... as if a loud holler was going to cover my gutlessness. I have to do something more. Maybe I am in love. I lay back on the green meadow.”

— Osamu Dazai

303. “The roar of laughter at civilization’s end.”

— Osamu Dazai

304. “I felt at the mercy of these waves, a light and beautiful feeling that I would be able to live on this way.”

— Osamu Dazai

305. “Shame on me for making such a mockery of myself. Blame it on my wounded pride. The fact is that my fear of being ridiculed is so intense I’d rather beat my critics to the punch. That’s the epitome of cowardice.”

— Osamu Dazai

306. “Imagine saying that the law was the antonym of crime! But perhaps everybody in “society” can go on living in self-satisfaction, thanks to just such simple concepts. They think that crime hatches where there are no policemen.”

— Osamu Dazai

307. “Let me be natural, let me be genuine.”

— Osamu Dazai

308. “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. 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. Happiness...”

— Osamu Dazai

309. “I grew up loyal, so don’t let me die a traitor.”

— Osamu Dazai

310. “Me cuesta entender que el ser humano viva o quiera vivir con pureza, claridad y felicidad en medio de toda esta mentira mutua.”

— Osamu Dazai

311. “It was only natural for Yozo to vacillate when asked about the reason behind his suicide – it was everything to him.”

— Osamu Dazai

312. “We all remain children, no matter how much time goes by. We don’t understand anything.”

— Osamu Dazai

313. “He just wanted to run – to do something for nothing.”

— Osamu Dazai

314. “I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.”

— Osamu Dazai

315. “It has seemed to me in fact that those who called me lucky were incomparably more fortunate than I.”

— Osamu Dazai

316. “What am I but a tangle of uncertainty and pride?”

— Osamu Dazai

317. “I’ve caused people a lot of grief. I haven’t written anything worthwhile. It’s all bluster. Dishonesty. Cravenness. Lies. Lechery. Cowardice. I don’t need to wait for God’s judgment, I’m already constantly spilling out lame excuses.”

— Osamu Dazai

318. “A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance. If that’s beyond your comprehension, dear reader, then you and I will never understand each other. Life’s a farce, so we might as well make it a good one. But real life is a realm that I may never reach. The best that I can hope for is to loiter in the memory of these four days, so steeped with empathy. Four days that count more than five or ten years of my life. Four days that count more than a lifetime.”

— Osamu Dazai

319. “I learned to read silently too. That’s why I could finish one book after another without getting tired.”

— Osamu Dazai

320. “Poverty is nothing. As long as you love me, all I want is to spend my whole life by your side.”

— Osamu Dazai

321. “To paint something good for once, he said. And said it laughing. Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.”

— Osamu Dazai

322. “Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves.”

— Osamu Dazai

323. “The reason I hate glasses so much is because I think the beauty of your eyes is the best thing about people. Even if they can’t see your nose or if your mouth is hidden, I think all I need are your eyes – the kind eyes that will inspire others, when they are looking into them, to live more beautifully.”

— Osamu Dazai

324. “The recognition of any reality begins with trust.”

— Osamu Dazai

325. “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.” The classrooms and the dormitory seemed like the dumping grounds of distorted sexual desires, and even my virtually perfected antics were of no use there.”

— Osamu Dazai

326. “This world can be a boring place. Who can blame them for wanting something exciting to happen?”

— Osamu Dazai

327. “It would have been better had I turned into a character from my own stories. An idle womaniser.”

— Osamu Dazai

328. “The problem with tradition is that it can cause even an error of great magnitude to go unnoticed.”

— Osamu Dazai

329. “Welcome to Sadness. Population one.”

— Osamu Dazai

330. “If things went well I would like to become his inseparable friend; but if this proved utterly impossible, I had no choice but to pray for his death.”

— Osamu Dazai

331. “Although I had a moral dread of human beings I seemed quite unable to renounce their society. I managed to maintain on the surface a smile which never deserted my lips; this was the accommodation I offered to others, a most precarious achievement preformed by me only at the cost of excruciating efforts within.”

— Osamu Dazai

332. “I’m afraid I don’t really have a clear understanding of the psychology of the powerful- particularly the absolutely invincible variety, which I’ve never met or known to exist. I’m a story writer with such feeble imaginative powers that unless I myself have experienced something, I can’t write one line- I can’t write a word- about it.”

— Osamu Dazai

333. “I wish I could be glad that I was born, that I am alive, that there are people in the world.”

— Osamu Dazai

334. “The Venerable’ – isn’t that what you call yourself? Trying to find comfort in dreams of a past that will never come again, rather than hope for the future.”

— Osamu Dazai

335. “Perhaps by depravity he actually meant tenderness.”

— Osamu Dazai

336. “The sly ability to steal someone else’s experience and recreate it as if it were my own is the only real talent I possess.”

— Osamu Dazai

337. “It takes an egomaniac like me to play the fool convincingly.”

— Osamu Dazai

338. “Even if one is not “qualified to be loved,” one is eternally “qualified to love.” To seek only the joy of being adored is to surrender to savagery and ignorance.”

— Osamu Dazai

339. “The fact is that my fear of being ridiculed is so intense I’d rather beat my critics to the punch.”

— Osamu Dazai

340. “But there is no limit to a proud and beautiful maiden’s capacity for cruelty.”

— Osamu Dazai

341. “No matter how often I tried, she never once complimented me.”

— Osamu Dazai

342. “The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual.”

— Osamu Dazai

343. “God, I ask you, is non-resistance a sin?”

— Osamu Dazai

344. “That faint and distant sound of hammering was like a miracle, stripping me of every militaristic illusion. Never again would I become intoxicated by that nightmare with its so-called pathos and glory.”

— Osamu Dazai

345. “It’s because people have aspirations and ambitions that solitude wears on them. If you don’t have a damn about what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years- a thousand years- with no difficulty whatsoever. At least, you can if you don’t let criticism bother you.”

— Osamu Dazai

346. “What am I but a tangle of uncertainty and pride? That just sums up this novel. Ah, why do I hasten to pass judgment on everything? Who instilled me with this sick imperative to pin down every thought?”

— Osamu Dazai

347. “If you keep a goldfish in captivity but don’t take care of it then it won’t live more than a month. Even if it’s a lie, give me my pride, my freedom, and the rolling green meadows!”

— Osamu Dazai

348. “Even now, I barely have the strength to reread what I’ve written.”

— Osamu Dazai

349. “The likable weeds and the not likable weeds looked exactly the same but were somehow clearly divided into those that seemed innocuous and those that seemed horrible. It didn’t stand to reason. What a girl likes and what she hates seems rather arbitrary to me.”

— Osamu Dazai

350. “When one’s life begins to unravel, one is tempted, sadly enough, to cling to the thread of prophecy.”

— Osamu Dazai