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Osamu Dazai Quotes

1909–1948

Writers

Random Osamu Dazai quote

188 quotes

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

A man crushed by reality puts on a show of endurance.

They say that love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, but people generally get the sense backwards.

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

I have always shook with fright before human beings.

The injection made me forget how weak my body was, and I applied myself energetically to my cartoon.

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for morality which human beings arbitrarily devise.

The true substance of love lies in the act of howling words of love with a desperation of a man jumping into the high seas.

I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others.

I hadn’t the strength even to choose between two alternatives.

"To fall for," "to be fallen for"—I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent.

I lacked even the ability to pay visits.

“Every family,” he jested, “has a fool—just to keep it in touch with reality.”

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.

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

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

The roar of laughter at civilization’s end.

And yet, although not a single instance of wrongdoing occurs in the story, people end up unhappy.

Why is physical love bad and spiritual love good?

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Osamu Dazai (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.