Quote

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

Osamu Dazai

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Osamu Dazai
Age: 38 †
Born: 1909
Born: June 19
Died: 1948
Died: June 13
Author
Novelist
Writer
Tsushima Shuji
Human
Invented
Humans
Vice
Vices
Concepts
Morality
Beings
Virtue
Arbitrarily
Words
Devised

More quotes by Osamu Dazai

Image
What did he mean by society? The plural of human beings?
Osamu Dazai
Image
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.
Osamu Dazai
Image
The real things are apt to be deviant.
Osamu Dazai
Image
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
Image
Now even if I die, no one will be so grieved as to do himself bodily harm.
Osamu Dazai
Image
In my case such an expression as 'to be fallen for' or even 'to be loved' is not in the least appropriate perhaps it describes the situation more accurately to say that I was 'looked after.
Osamu Dazai
Image
Addiction is perhaps a sickness of the spirit.
Osamu Dazai
Image
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.
Osamu Dazai
Image
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.
Osamu Dazai
Image
A true artist is an ugly man.
Osamu Dazai
Image
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.
Osamu Dazai
Image
As for love . . . no, having once written that word I can write nothing more.
Osamu Dazai
Image
Last year nothing happened The year before nothing happened And the year before that nothing happened.
Osamu Dazai
Image
Any man who criticizes my suicide and passes judgment on me with an expression of superiority, declaring (without offering the least help) that I should have gone on living my full complement of days, is assuredly a prodigy among men quite capable of tranquilly urging the Emperor to open a fruit shop.
Osamu Dazai
Image
Then what's a synonym for woman? Entrails. You're not very poetic, are you? Well, then, what's the antonym for entrails? Milk.
Osamu Dazai
Image
I have always found the female of the human species many times more difficult to understand than the male.
Osamu Dazai
Image
To be a friend of the weak-that is the artist's point of departure as well as his ultimate goal.
Osamu Dazai
Image
I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied.
Osamu Dazai
Image
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.
Osamu Dazai
Image
Labeled a delinquent. That's the only kind of label I want to be crucified under.
Osamu Dazai