Home > Author > Osamu Dazai
1 " This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution. "
― Osamu Dazai , The Setting Sun
2 " I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another. "
― Osamu Dazai , No Longer Human
3 " All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? - I don't know. "
4 " 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. "
5 " I have no desire for others to take it on themselves to analyze my thoughts. I am without thoughts. I have never, not even once, acted on the basis of any doctrine or philosophy.I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world. "
6 " He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost. "
7 " In spite of my suffering, at the thought that I was sure to end up by killing myself, I cried aloud and burst into tears. "
8 " When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn't write a novel, people said I couldn't write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint. "
9 " It isn't that I dislike artists, but I can't stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character. "
10 " Last year nothing happenedThe year before nothing happenedAnd the year before that nothinghappened. "
11 " Why can’t people get along without criticizing one another?” Urashima shakes his head as he ponders this rudimentary question. “Never have the bush clover blooming on the beach, nor the little crabs who skitter o’er the sand, nor the wild geese resting their wings in yonder cove found fault with me. Would that human beings too were thus! 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. It’s most vexing. "
― Osamu Dazai , Otogizōshi: The Fairy Tale Book of Dazai Osamu
12 " 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. "
13 " The wound has gradually become dearer to me than my own flesh and blood, and I have thought its pain to be the emotion of the wound as it lived or even its murmur of affection "
― Osamu Dazai
14 " For the first time in my life I realized what a horrible, miserable, salvationless hell it is to be without money. "
15 " Even if Mary gives birth to a child who is not her husband's, if she has a shining pride, they become a holy mother and child. "
16 " Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague notion of what it meant. It is a struggle between one individual to another, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is everything. ‘Human beings never submit to human beings.’ Even slaves practice their mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival except of a single then-and-there contest. They speak of duty to one’s country and such like things, but the object of their effort is invariably the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. "
17 " After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it. "
18 " Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man's got to fake just to stay alive. "
19 " I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.I want money. Unless I have it....In my sleep, a natural death! "
20 " Humanity? Don't be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness. "
