Osamu Dazai Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
-
“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 -
“Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“What frightened me was the logic of the world; in it lay the foretaste of something incalculably powerful. Its mechanism was incomprehensible, and I could not possibly remain closeted in that windowless, bone-chilling room. Though outside lay the sea of irrationality, it was far more agreeable to swim in its waters until presently I drowned.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“To fall for," "to be fallen for"--I feel in these words something unspeakably vulgar, farcical, and at the same time extraordinarily complacent. Once these expressions put in an appearance, no matter how solemn the place, the silent cathedrals of melancholy crumble, leaving nothing but an impression of fatuousness. It is curious, but the cathedrals of melancholy are not necessarily demolished if one can replace the vulgar "What a messy business it is to be fallen for" by the more literary "What uneasiness lies in being loved.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“One day, I went to a soba restaurant outside town, and while I was waiting for the zarusoba I opened an old graph magazine. There was a picture of an exhausted, lonely kneeling woman who wore a checked patterned yukata after the tradegy of a large earthquake. With the intensity of my chest ready to burn up, I fell in love with that poor woman. I also felt a horrifying desire for her. Maybe tragedy and desire are back to back to one another.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“I drink out of desperation. Life is too dreary to endure. The misery, loneliness, crampedness - they're heartbreaking.[...] What feelings do you suppose a man has when he realizes that he will never know happiness or glory as long as he lives? Hard work. All that amounts to is food for the wild beasts of hunger.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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 -
“Scoundrels [...] simply don't die. The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people. [...] Scoundrels live a long time. The beautiful die young.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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 -
“And I was incapable of living all by myself in those lodgings where I didn't know a soul. It terrified me to sit by myself quietly in my room. I felt frightened, as if I might be set upon or struck by someone at any moment.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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 -
“It would seem that the more irresponsible and crafty one is, the more likely one is to have a talent for storytelling.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“Any man who criticizes my suicide and passes judgment on me with an expression of superiority, declaring (without offering the least help) that I should have gone on living my full complement of days, is assuredly a prodigy among men quite capable of tranquilly urging the Emperor to open a fruit shop.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“I have often felt that I would find it more complicated, troublesome and unpleasant to ascertain the feelings by which a woman lives than to plumb the innermost thoughts of an earthworm.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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 -
“Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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. I thought that Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beautiful, but to live, to survive – those things somehow seem hideous and contaminated with blood.”
-- Osamu Dazai -
“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. But those people can fight their unhappiness with society fairly and squarly, and society for its part easily understands and sympathizes with such struggles. My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.”
-- Osamu Dazai
You may also like:
-
Akira Kurosawa
Film director -
Banana Yoshimoto
Writer -
Haruki Murakami
Writer -
Junichiro Tanizaki
Author -
Kazuo Ishiguro
Novelist -
Kenji Miyazawa
Poet -
Kenzaburo Oe
Author -
Kobo Abe
Writer -
Lafcadio Hearn
Writer -
Masaoka Shiki
Poet -
Masuji Ibuse
Author -
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
Writer -
Shusaku Endo
Author -
Soseki Natsume
Novelist -
Takuboku Ishikawa
Poet -
Yasunari Kawabata
Writer -
Yoko Ogawa
Writer -
Yukio Mishima
Author