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Osamu Dazai Quotes

1909–1948

Writers

Random Osamu Dazai quote

188 quotes

It made me miserable that I was rapidly becoming an adult and that I was unable to do anything about it.

Whenever I let the slightest thing make me forget myself, I can't help but be disappointed.

If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.

These clownish words of deceit were taken more seriously than the truth.

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

Even now, I barely have the strength to reread what I've written.

I do not trust the world. My only ally is the tagged dissolute.

I would far prefer to be told simply to go and die. It's straightforward. But people almost never say, "Die!" Paltry, prudent hypocrites!

But in my softness I find peace, however fleeting.

Are "people in the world", I wonder, creatures that spend their whole lives greeting each other in stiff, formal patterns, being cautious about each other, then growing tired of each other? I hate meeting people.

Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes. That is the one and only thing that I have thought resembled a truth in the society of human beings where I have dwelled up to now as in a burning hell. Everything passes.

There's something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

It was pathetic how utterly devoid of greed they really were.

Each day I deceived myself, unlike you who could never deceive yourself. Anxiety was trapped in the depths of my heart, like a formation of black clouds I could not break free of.

I can't see anything that's dirty. Only big things—vivid intense colors and light are all that enters my vision.

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

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

My heart had melted into something akin to a sensation of happiness, peace of mind one might even say, at the realization that I had now reached the very bottom of agony.

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

Attribution

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