Osamu Dazai Quotes

As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be alright. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much if I remain outside their lives. The one thing I must avoid is becoming offensive in their eyes: I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.

Of course, I intended to die without telling a soul about my illness. Without anyone knowing, I would secretly deteriorate. Actually, I felt that there was nothing else I could do. I had no alternatives. Shouldn’t I be resolved to die as a peasant in my horribly confused final circumstance? I had no excuses. It was not because life suddenly became precious, but the forced pretense until yesterday had disappeared.

Excessively passionate characters have a tendency to behave poorly.

There was something wrong about these people. But perhaps, just as it is true of my love, they could not go on living except in the way they do. If it is true that man, once born into the world, must somehow live out his life, perhaps the appearance that people make in order to go through with it, even if it is as ugly as their appearance, should not be despised. To be alive. To be alive. An intolerably immense undertaking before which one can only gasp in apprehension.

I was frightened even by God. I could not believe in his love, only his punishment. Faith. That, I felt, was the act of facing the tribunal of justice with one's head bowed to receive the scourge of God. I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.

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 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. This is how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror of the illusion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively, without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to the needs of the moment.

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

My definition of a "respected" man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people, but who was finally seen through by some omniscient, omnipotent person who ruined him and made him suffer a shame worse than death.

Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they're being honest if they hide behind a laugh.

You takes things too seriously. It seems you’re not satisfied unless you always make yourself the protagonist in some tragedy.

But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.

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.

Even if released, I would be forever branded on the forehead with the word "madman," or perhaps, "reject".
Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.

I am convinced that those people whom the world considers good and respects are all liars and fakes. I do not trust the world. My only ally is the tagged dissolute. The tagged dissolute. That is the only cross on which I wish to be crucified. Though ten thousand people criticize me, I can throw in their teeth my challenge: Are you not all the more dangerous for being without tags?

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.