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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.

Osamu Dazai

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Osamu Dazai
Age: 38 †
Born: 1909
Born: June 19
Died: 1948
Died: June 13
Author
Novelist
Writer
Tsushima Shuji
Freedom
Gain
Individual
Individuals
World
Terror
Gains
Illusion
Ocean
Called
Modicum
Society
Managed

More quotes by Osamu Dazai

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I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.
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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.
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The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness
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Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as to do himself bodily harm.
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A true artist is an ugly man.
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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.
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The real things are apt to be deviant.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I like roses best. But they bloom in all four seasons. I wonder if people who like roses best have to die four times over again.
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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.
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To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.
Osamu Dazai
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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.
Osamu Dazai
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Labeled a delinquent. That's the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.
Osamu Dazai
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Is it not true that no two human beings understand anything whatsoever about each other, that those who consider themselves bosom friends may be utterly mistaken about their fellow and, failing to realize this sad truth throughout a lifetime, weep when they read in the newspapers about his death?
Osamu Dazai
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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.
Osamu Dazai
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Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
Osamu Dazai
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As for love . . . no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
Osamu Dazai
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Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai