1. “I must go on living. And, though it may be childish of me, I can’t go on in simple compliance. From now on I must struggle with the world.” – Osamu Dazai
2. “No. You won’t do. You’ve treated me nicely, yes, but only because you find me curious and amusing. It made me feel so lonely, somehow… I’m really just a foolish and useless person.” – Osamu Dazai
3. “I hope I meet lots of people with lovely eyes.” – Osamu Dazai
4. “The world, after all, was still a place of bottomless horror. It was by no means a place of childlike simplicity where everything could be settled by a simple then-and-there decision.” – Osamu Dazai
5. “Human beings never submit to human beings.” – Osamu Dazai
6. “There’s something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.” – Osamu Dazai
7. “Last year, nothing happened. The year before, nothing happened. And the year before that, nothing happened.” – Osamu Dazai
8. “People depend on death to be complete. While alive, they are all incomplete.” – Osamu Dazai
9. “I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness – they’re heartbreaking.” – Osamu Dazai
10. “Within our family, it is solely Mama who embodies authentic nobility. She possesses a certain allure that none of us can hope to emulate.” – Osamu Dazai
11. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
12. “I want to spend my time with people who don’t look to be respected. But such good people won’t want to spend their time with me.” – Osamu Dazai
13. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
14. “Unhappiness. There are all kinds of unhappy people in the world. I suppose it would be no exaggeration to say that the world is composed entirely of unhappy people.” – Osamu Dazai
15. “Anyway, you can be sure of one thing, a man’s got to fake just to stay alive.” – Osamu Dazai
16. “I could believe in hell but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.” – Osamu Dazai
17. “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess what it must be to live the life of a human being.” – Osamu Dazai
18. “Without observing death up close, one can’t capture the full picture of what it means to live.” – Osamu Dazai
19. “Anything I would never want to lose is always lost. It’s a given that everything that is worth wanting will be lost the moment I obtain it. There is nothing worth pursuing at the cost of prolonging a life of suffering.” – Osamu Dazai
20. “I had the feeling that were Mother to die, my own flesh would melt away with her.” – Osamu Dazai
21. “I am not suited to this world.” – Osamu Dazai
22. “I have always found the world… to be a bitter place.” – Osamu Dazai
23. “My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.” – Osamu Dazai
24. “When you’ve got the devil’s own luck, you’re immune from the usual run of disasters. Such people must be utilized.” – Osamu Dazai
25. “It’s always the same. Once you are honest with yourself, things are bound to go wrong.” – Osamu Dazai
26. “What is society but an individual’s struggle to be accepted by others?” – Osamu Dazai
27. “Living itself is the source of sin.” – Osamu Dazai
28. “At times everything grows misty and dark before my eyes, and I feel that the strength of my whole body is oozing away through my finger tips.” – Osamu Dazai
29. “I kept running away from myself, but I couldn’t escape.” – Osamu Dazai
30. “I shall be nothing, the wind, the sky.” – Osamu Dazai
31. “As someone who understands suffering, You resisted violence and evil. And saved many people who were in positions of weakness.” – Osamu Dazai
32. “I had succeeded in appearing mischievous. I had succeeded in escaping from being respected.” – Osamu Dazai
33. “I’m going somewhere where there aren’t any women.” – Osamu Dazai
34. “This was how I happened to invent my clowning.” – Osamu Dazai
35. “It was strange how she calmed my agitation with those few words.” – Osamu Dazai
36. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
37. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
38. “If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose.” – Osamu Dazai
39. “Evil expects evil from others.” – Osamu Dazai
40. “Welcome to Sadness. Population one.” – Osamu Dazai
41. “Young people never say anything straight. You can tell they’re being honest if they hide behind a laugh.” – Osamu Dazai
42. “Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.” – Osamu Dazai
43. “I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.” – Osamu Dazai
44. “These wounds, unlike the scars from the lashing a man might give, cut inwards very deep, like an internal hemorrhage, bringing intense discomfort.” – Osamu Dazai
45. “Whenever I let the slightest thing make me forget myself, I can’t help but be disappointed.” – Osamu Dazai
46. “Just leave it fo me, and everything will be fine! After all, l am Dazai, the one and only whom the agency trusts. and the populace adores.” – Osamu Dazai
47. “My definition of a “respected” man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people.” – Osamu Dazai
48. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
49. “Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it’s probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come.” – Osamu Dazai
50. “Justice is like a weapon but it can be used to cause harm but it cannot protect or save others.” – Osamu Dazai
51. “The beautiful die young.” – Osamu Dazai
52. “What uneasiness lies in being loved.” – Osamu Dazai
53. “I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.” – Osamu Dazai
54. “A life free of lies! Ah, but that, too, was, by definition, a lie. Surely a lie already dwelled in the heart of anyone who sought to make such distinctions and stand in judgment.” – Osamu Dazai
55. “A true artist is an ugly man.” – Osamu Dazai
56. “Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.” – Osamu Dazai
57. “He must live up to his friend’s trust – that alone mattered.” – Osamu Dazai
58. “I yearned for everything long gone.” – Osamu Dazai
59. “I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.” – Osamu Dazai
60. “To appeal for help to any human being—I could expect nothing from that expedient.” – Osamu Dazai
61. “Trust is the strongest bond between people. It’s the one thing worth risking everything for.” – Osamu Dazai
62. “It isn’t that I dislike artists, but I can’t stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.” – Osamu Dazai
63. “My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.” – Osamu Dazai
64. “My unhappiness was the unhappiness of a person who could not say no.” – Osamu Dazai
65. “Loneliness is a kind of sickness you can only recover from by helping others.” – Osamu Dazai
66. “Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as to do himself bodily harm.” – Osamu Dazai
67. “I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.” – Osamu Dazai
68. “Time flows without pause, indifferent to the struggle of man.” – Osamu Dazai
69. “I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again.” – Osamu Dazai
70. “I am convinced that human beings’ lives are, in essence, divided into two categories: those who have suffered and those who will.” – Osamu Dazai
71. “What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?” – Osamu Dazai
72. “In my case such an expression as ‘to be fallen for’ or even ‘to be loved’ is not in the least appropriate; perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was ‘looked after.” – Osamu Dazai
73. “I am a lonely man who can laugh in his loneliness.” – Osamu Dazai
74. “Eat or die, the saying goes, but to my ears it sounded like just one more unpleasant threat.” – Osamu Dazai
75. “There’s no one who can fully grasp the deepest feelings of another person. Only you can understand them. I can only tell you one general thing. When someone’s father dies, they tend to cry.” – Osamu Dazai
76. “From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?” – Osamu Dazai
77. “Excessively passionate characters have a tendency to behave poorly.” – Osamu Dazai
78. “Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.” – Osamu Dazai
79. “If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.” – Osamu Dazai
80. “The weak fear happiness itself.” – Osamu Dazai
81. “The possession of a title does not an aristocrat make.” – Osamu Dazai
82. “Now I have neither happiness nor unhappiness. Everything passes.” – Osamu Dazai
83. “I thought that words were what held human beings together.” – Osamu Dazai
84. “What is happiness? It’s when people say they are happy.” – Osamu Dazai
85. “I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.” – Osamu Dazai
86. “It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.” – Osamu Dazai
87. “If you place yourself somewhere close to raw emotions where you’re expoded to violence and death, you can brush against man’s true nature. I thought I could find a reason to live somehow.” – Osamu Dazai
88. “Disqualified as a human being.” – Osamu Dazai
89. “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.” – Osamu Dazai
90. “The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.” – Osamu Dazai
91. “A good book is always good, no matter how many times you read it.” – Osamu Dazai
92. “Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.” – Osamu Dazai
93. “Without observing death up close, one can’t capture the full picture of what it means to live.” – Osamu Dazai