Top 15 Osamu Dazai Quotes

The year before last I was expelled from my family and, reduced to poverty overnight, was left to wander the streets, begging help for various quarters, barely managing to stay alive from one day to the next, and just when I'd begun to think I might be able to support myself with my writing, I came down with a serious illness. Thanks to the compassion of others, I was able to rent a small house in Funabashi, Chiba, next to the muddy sea, and spent the summer there alone, convalescing. Though battling an illness that each and every night left my robe literally drenched with sweat, I had no choice but to press ahead with my work. The cold half pint of milk I drank each morning was the only thing that gave me a certain peculiar sense of the joy in life; my mental anguish and exhaustion were such that the oleanders blooming in one corner of the garden appeared to me merely flicking tongues of flame...

People do not necessarily think and consider in a prescribed way before choosing the path they'll walk. For the most part they simply wander, at some point, into a different meadow.

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

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

The roar of laughter at civilization’s end.

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.

Just to see all the books lining the shelves would lighten my mood as if by magic. Of course, I didn’t go to bookstores just to read articles on anatomy. I went because any book gave me comfort and solace at the time.

I was a petal quivering in the slightest breeze, about to fall any moment. Even the slightest insult made me think of dying.

Masks in one layer after another—as many as ten or twenty—had fastened themselves upon me, and I could no longer tell how sad any one of them really was.

Nevertheless, I still wait for someone. Who on earth am I waiting for, sitting here everyday? For what sort of person? Maybe what I'm waiting for isn't even a human. I dislike humans. No, I fear them. When I meet someone and indifferently exchange such greetings as 'How are you?' or 'It's become cold', greetings I don't want to make, I somehow get the unpleasant feeling that there is no such horrible liar in the whole world as I, and I wish I were dead.

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

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.

Real thought takes courage more than intelligence.

Fuji goes well with the evening primrose. (Alternate translation: Evening primroses really look very well in the landscape of Mt. Fuji.)

Is it painful to be the person who waits? Or is it more painful to be the person who makes others wait? Either way, there's no need to wait anymore. That's what is most painful.