Top 350 Osamu Dazai Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 7 of 8

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

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

— Osamu Dazai

304. “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

305. “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

306. “Ah! Are not all authors the same? So quick to dress up their confessions. I barely qualify as human. Will I ever be a functional member of society? Even as I write these words, I worry how the sentences will sound.”

— Osamu Dazai

307. “From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual? From the moment I suspected that society might be an individual I was able to act more in accordance with my own inclinations.”

— Osamu Dazai

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

311. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

313. “This novel was doomed from the start. All posture and no substance. Whether I write one page or a hundred, it amounts to the same thing. Though I knew this from the start.”

— Osamu Dazai

314. “I was so crazed by my own sufferng that I became blind to the obvious fact that other people, too, were living for all they were worth.”

— Osamu Dazai

315. “I drop steadily, inevitably, into unhappiness, and I have no specific plan to stave off my descent.”

— Osamu Dazai

316. “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.”

— Osamu Dazai

317. “I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind.”

— Osamu Dazai

318. “Ah! I do have things to say. I have lots to say. It’s just that suddenly I don’t feel like saying them. I just don’t want to. Hell with it. I don’t care if my hometown never understands me. I’m resigned to that. I give up on the robes of gold.”

— Osamu Dazai

319. “Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in this world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people.”

— Osamu Dazai

320. “I want to love everyone,” I thought, almost tearfully. If you stare at the sky, it changes little by little. Gradually it turns bluish. Then, with nothing more than a sigh, I felt the urge to be naked. I had never seen anything as beautiful as the translucent leaves and grass. Gently, I reached out to touch the grass. I want to live beautifully.”

— Osamu Dazai

321. “What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.”

— Osamu Dazai

322. “It may require courage to say what they said, but were they really able to take responsibility for the consequences?”

— Osamu Dazai

323. “It may be true that in any society defective types with low vitality like myself are doomed to perish, not because of what they think or anything else, but because of themselves. I have, however, some slight excuse to offer. I feel the overwhelming pressure of circumstances which make it extremely difficult for me to live.”

— Osamu Dazai

324. “Revolution and love are in fact the best, most pleasurable things in the world, and we realize it is precisely because they are so good that the older and wiser heads have spitefully fobbed off in us their sour grapes of a lie. This I want to believe implicitly: man was born for love and revolution.”

— Osamu Dazai

325. “You do not know that you are loved.”

— Osamu Dazai

326. “Even if you die, don’t become his plaything!”

— Osamu Dazai

327. “Beautiful feelings make bad literature. In which case, this precious state of prose is proof that I’m no devil after all. Ah, blessed be the man who coined this phrase! It is a treasure of the language. An author can get away with using it but once in his career. Sad to say. The first time, it’s endearing. If you insist on using it a second or a third time, though, dear reader, hiding behind it like a shield, you can expect nothing but misery.”

— Osamu Dazai

328. “Beautiful feelings make bad literature.”

— Osamu Dazai

329. “I felt my heart would burst with longing for Tokyo especially when it grew dark. Then everything seemed to go blank before me. It wasn’t an ordinary sickness. 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

330. “Where waste occurs, want will follow.”

— Osamu Dazai

331. “He would show up not with women but with two or three newspaper or magazine reporters. According to some of these fellows, now that the military had fallen, the impoverished poets and artists were going to be the new public heroes.”

— Osamu Dazai

332. “In their conversations, “major” was frequently employed as an intensifying adjective. This world can be a boring place. Who can blame them for wanting something exciting to happen?”

— Osamu Dazai

333. “I felt so grateful, so happy for that gentle smile that I averted my face and wept. I was completely shattered and smothered by that one gentle smile.”

— Osamu Dazai

334. “I just need one more year to finish my suicide note.”

— Osamu Dazai

335. “Just when I was beginning to forget, that bird of ill-omen came flapping my way, to rip open with its beak the wounds of memory. All at once shame over the past and the recollection of sin unfolded themselves before my eyes and, seized by a terror so great it made me want to shriek, I could not sit still a moment longer. “How about a drink?” I asked.”

— Osamu Dazai

336. “At that same moment, I became convinced that somewhere another sad and pitiful girl was doing the wash and smiling softly at this very moon.”

— Osamu Dazai

337. “I had never seen anything as beautiful as the translucent leaves and grass. Gently, I reached out to touch the grass. I want to live beautifully.”

— Osamu Dazai

338. “I wonder how it would be if I let go and yielded myself to depravity.”

— Osamu Dazai

339. “It is true, I suppose, that nobody finds it exactly pleasant to be criticised or be shouted at, but I see in the face of the human being raging at me a wild animal in its true colour, one more horrible than any lion, crocodile, or lion. People normally seem to be hiding his true nature, but an occasion will arise when anger makes them reveal in a flash human nature in all its horror.”

— Osamu Dazai

340. “Valuing physical sensations above moral considerations is evidence of either mental deficiency or demonic evil.”

— Osamu Dazai

341. “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

342. “All my friends have left me. They look back at me with eyes of pity. Come back, friends. Let’s talk together, laugh together. But no, you turn away as if we’ve never met. Speak up, friends. Ask away. I’ll tell you anything. It was me.”

— Osamu Dazai

343. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai

345. “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

346. “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

347. “I can’t stand how poor and pathetic he is, and because of that I am cruel to him.”

— Osamu Dazai

348. “I live solely on my writing now. On signing the registers at inns when I travel, I have no hesitation about listing “writer” as my occupation. If I suffer, I don’t talk much about it much. I may suffer even more than before, but I wear a smile.”

— Osamu Dazai

349. “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

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

— Osamu Dazai