Quotes from Osamu Dazai

If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.

A mere smile can determine a woman's fate. It is frightening. Fascinatingly so. I have to be careful.

I have tried insofar as possible to avoid getting involved in the sordid complications of human beings. I have been afraid of being sucked down into their bottomless whirlpool.

I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat.

Such it is for those in the grips of misfortune: declarations of support and sympathy, rather than providing comfort, may merely increase the victim's pain.

The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people.

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.

The courageous testimony of Dr. Faust that a maiden's smile is more precious than history, philosophy, education, religion, law, politics,economics, and all the other branches of learning. Learning is another name for vanity. It is the effort of human beings not to be human beings.

I am congenitally unable to take much interest in other people,

There are some people whose dread of human beings is so morbid that they reach a point where they yearn to see with their own eyes monsters of ever more horrible shapes.

The incomprehensibility of society is the incomprehensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is the individual.

Did you cry?" "No. I didn't cry ... I just kept thinking that when human beings get that way, they're no good for anything.

Just because a person has a title doesn't make him an aristocrat. Some people are great aristocrats who have no other title than the one that nature has bestowed on them, and others like us, who have nothing but titles, are closer to being pariahs than aristocrats.

It isn't that I dislike artists, but I can't stand anyone who puts on those ponderous airs of a man of character.

When you've got the devil's own luck, you're immune from the usual run of disasters. Such people must be utilized.

I'm going somewhere where there aren't any women.

A science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious.

When I lay next to her my body was enveloped in her current, which mingled with my own harsher current of gloom like a " withered leaf settling to rest on the stones at the bottom of a pool." I had freed myself from fear and uneasiness.

Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue

I had learned bit by bit the art of meeting people with a straight face—no, that's not true: I have never been able to meet anyone without an accompaniment of painful smiles, the buffoonery of defeat. What I had acquired was the technique of stammering somehow, almost in a daze, the necessary small talk.

Haven't we known for a long time that it's a mistake to attach meaning to each and every action of a person? Forced explanations often end in a distortion of lies.

Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.

Nothing was so hard for me to understand, so baffling, and at the same time so filled with menacing overtones as the commonplace remark, "Human beings work to earn their bread, for if they don't eat, they die.

Disqualified as a human being. I had now ceased utterly to be a human being.