Quotes from Osamu Dazai

Es doloroso ser la persona que espera? ¿O es más doloroso ser la persona que hace esperar a los demás? De cualquier manera, no hay necesidad de esperar más. Eso es lo más doloroso.

It's a faculty absolutely unique to man—having secrets.

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.

never could think of prostitutes as human beings or even as women. They seemed more like imbeciles or lunatics. But in their arms I felt absolute security. I could sleep soundly.

Bu, benim insanlarda son sevgi aray???md?. Bir yandan insanlardan son derece korkarken, bir yandan da insanlar? bir türlü akl?mdan ç?karamad?m. Öylece, ?aklabanl?k sayesinde ince bir çizgiyle insanlarla olan ba??m? koruyabildim. D??ar?ya kar??, durmaks?z?n gülümseyen yüzümü gösterirken, iç dünyam ölüydü.

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.

I even watched in silence when my own wife was violated.

Beautiful feelings make bad literature. In which case, this precious state of prose is proof that I'm no devil after all. Ah, blessed be the man who coined this phrase! It is a treasure of the language. An author can get away with using it but once in his career. Sad to say. The first time, it's endearing. If you insist on using it a second or a third time, though, dear reader, hiding behind it like a shield, you can expect nothing but misery.

Even the servants, when asked by my mother about the meeting, answered as if it were their spontaneous thought, that it had been really interesting. These were the self-same servants who had been bitterly complaining on the way home that political meetings are the most boring thing in the world

I should have died sooner. But there was one thing: Mama's love. When I thought of that I couldn't die. It's true, as I have said, that just as man has the right to live as he chooses, he has the right to die when he pleases, and yet as long as my mother remained alive, I felt that the right to death would have to be left in abeyance, for to exercise it would have meant killing her too.

En mi existencia ya no existe la felicidad o el sufrimiento. Todo pasa.

Somehow it is not the smile of a human being: it utterly lacks substance, all of what we might call the "heaviness of blood" or perhaps the "solidity of human life"—it has not even a bird's weight. It is merely a blank sheet of paper, light as a feather, and it is smiling.

Pronto comprendí que el alcohol, el tabaco y las prostitutas eran un método excelente para librarme del miedo a los seres humanos, aunque fuese sólo por un momento. Y llegué a la conclusión de que para conseguir esos momentos valdría la pena vender hasta la última de mis posesiones.

Is this what all you refined gentlemen are like—wishing and pining and never acting?

One of my tragic flaws is the compulsion to add to every situation -a quality which has made people call me at times a liar- but I have almost never embellished in order to bring myself any advantage;

Bagaimanapun kau bisa meyakini satu hal: seorang lelaki musti berpura-pura demi meneruskan hidup.

The more I feared people the more I was liked, and the more I was liked the more I feared them.

I'm told that some men heat their bath water by burning the love letters they get from women

If you don't give a damn what the rest of the world is up to, you can be alone for a hundred years—a thousand years—with no difficulty whatsoever.

Greed did not cover it, nor did vanity. Nor was it simply a combination of lust and greed. I wasn't sure what it was, but I felt that there was something inexplicable at the bottom of human society which was not reducible to economics.

Can't a man be satisfied without having to beat everybody at everything?

But there is no limit to a proud and beautiful maiden's capacity for cruelty.

I have only to shut my eyes after looking at it to forget the face. I can remember the wall of the room, the little heater, but all impression of the face of the principal figure in the room is blotted out; I am unable to recall a single thing about it.

What superficiality—and what stupidity—there is in trying to depict in a pretty manner things which one has thought pretty. The masters through their subjective perceptions created beauty out of trivialities. They did not hide their interest even in things which were nauseatingly ugly, but soaked themselves in the pleasure of depicting them.