263 Quotes by Osamu Dazai

My heart had melted into something akin to a sensation of happiness, peace of mind one might even say, at the realization that I had now reached the very bottom of agony.

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.

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?

Excessively passionate characters have a tendency to behave poorly.

From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

The thought occurred to me as I lay there. You wait and wait for happiness, and when finally you can’t bear it any longer, you rush out of the house, only to hear later that a marvelous happiness arrived the following day at the home you had abandoned, and now it was too late. Sometimes happiness arrives one night too late.

A good book is always good, no matter how many times you’ve already read it.

We have a vague notion of the best place we should go, or the beautiful places we should like to see, or the kinds of places that would make us grow as a person. We yearn for a good life. We have real hopes and ambitions. We feel impatient for an unshakable faith that we can rely on. But it would require considerable effort to express such things in our typical life as a girl.