Quotes from Osamu Dazai

The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness

The weak fear happiness itself.

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.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

What did he mean by "society"? The plural of human beings?

What is society but an individual? [] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.

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.

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.

As for love . . . no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.

Labeled a delinquent. That's the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.

A true artist is an ugly man.

I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.

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.

To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.

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.

This I want to believe implicitly: Man was born for love and revolution.

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.

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.

Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

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.

People talk of "social outcasts." The words apparently denote the miserable losers of the world, the vicious ones, but I feel as though I have been a "social outcast" from the moment I was born. If ever I meet someone society has designated as an outcast, I invariably feel affection for him, an emotion which carries me away in melting tenderness.

I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.

He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.

What did he mean by "society"? The plural of human beings?