“No Longer Human” is a novel written by Osamu Dazai, a Japanese author regarded as one of the greatest fiction authors of the twentieth century.
The novel is about a guy who feels isolated from others around him and is shunned by society.

Let’s go through the list of greatest quotes from No Longer Human novel.
Table of Contents
No Longer Human Quotes from Osamu Dazai
“God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“My unhappiness stemmed entirely from my own vices, and I had no way of fighting anybody.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“There’s something about you that smells a little of a Christian priest. I find it offensive.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I’m going to paint too. I’m going to paint pictures of ghosts and devils and horses out of hell.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“The “world,” after all, was still a place of bottomless horror.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Despising each other as we did, we were constantly together, thereby degrading ourselves. If that is what the world calls friendship, the relations between Horiki and myself were undoubtedly those of friendship.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Popular Book Quotes: No Country for Old Men Quotes by Cormac McCarthy and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Quotes by Douglas Adams
Best No Longer Human Quotes
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I could believe in hell, but it was impossible for me to believe in the existence of heaven.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“What did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings?” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I despised him as one fit only for amusement, a man with whom I associated for that sole purpose.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Whenever I was asked what I wanted my first impulse was to answer “Nothing.” The thought went through my mind that it didn’t make any difference, that nothing was going to make me happy.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Disqualified as a human beings. I had now ceased utterly to be a human beings.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I know that I am liked by other people, but I seem to be deficient in the faculty to love others. (I should add that I have very strong doubts as to whether even human beings really possess this faculty.)” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Quotes from No Longer Human
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I have always shook with fright before human beings. Unable as I was to feel the least particle of confidence in my ability to speak and act like a human being, I kept my solitary agonies locked in my breast. I kept my melancholy and my agitation hidden, careful lest any trace should be left exposed. I feigned an innocent optimism; I gradually perfected myself in the role of the farcical eccentric.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“As long as I can make them laugh, it doesn’t matter how, I’ll be all right. If I succeed in that, the human beings probably won’t mind it too much I remain outside their lives.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“If you’ve slept soundly at night the morning is exhilarating, I suppose.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Top Quotes from No Longer Human
“It’s his father’s fault,” she said unemotionally. “The Yozo we knew was so easy-going and amusing, and if only he hadn’t drunk—no, even though he did drink—he was a good boy, an angel.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“What is society but an individual?” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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 (quote from No Longer Human).
“Extremely tragic is a good description of you.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people’s faces.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“The weak fear happiness itself.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I felt as though the vessel if my suffering had become empty, as if nothing could interest me now. I had lost even the ability to suffer.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“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 (quote from No Longer Human).
“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 (quote from No Longer Human).
“She must be unhappy too. Unhappy people are sensitive to the unhappiness of others.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Human beings never submit to human beings.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Powerful No Longer Human Quotes from Osamu Dazai
“Living itself is the source of sin.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“My eyes would swim in my head, and the whole world grow dark before me, so that I felt half out of my mind.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Most women have only to lay eyes on you to want to be doing something for you so badly they can’t stand it … You’re always so timid and yet you’re funny … Sometimes you get terribly lonesome and depressed, but that only makes a woman’s heart itch all the more for you.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Women found in me a man who could keep a love secret.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Women sleep so soundly they seem to be dead. Who knows? Women may live in order to sleep.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“When I liked something I tasted it hesitantly, furtively, as though it were extremely bitter.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Even now it comes as a shock if by chance I notice in the street a face resembling someone I know however slightly, and I am at once seized by a shivering violent enough to make me dizzy.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Show me what you’ve written,” I said, although I wanted desperately to avoid looking at it.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“The weak fear happiness itself. They can harm themselves on cotton wool. Sometimes they are wounded even by happiness.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Love flies out the window when poverty comes in the door, they say, and it’s true.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Thoughtful No Longer Human Quotes
“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 (quote from No Longer Human).
“If it failed I had no choice but to hang myself, a resolve which was tantamount to a bet on the existence of God.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“It occurred to me that prison life might actually be pleasanter than groaning away my sleepless nights in hellish dread of the “realities of life” as led by human beings.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I have frantically played the clown in order to distangle myself from these painful relationships, only to wear myself out as a result.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“After being hurt by the world so much, they began to see the demons within humans. So without hiding it through trickery, they worked to express it.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“If my neighbors manage to survive without killing themselves, without going mad, maintaining an interest in political parties, not yielding to despair, resolutely pursuing the fight for existence, can their griefs really be genuine?” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“He could only consider me as the living corpse of a would-be suicide, a person dead to shame, an idiot ghost.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“All I feel are the assaults of apprehension and terror at the thought that I am the only one who is entirely unlike the rest. It is almost impossible for me to converse with other people. What should I talk about, how should I say it? – I don’t know.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“I smiled in my weakness.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“Whenever anyone criticized me I felt certain that I had been living under the most dreadful misapprehension. I always accepted the attack in silence, though inwardly so terrified as almost to be out of my mind.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
“What uneasiness lies in being loved.” ~ Osamu Dazai (quote from No Longer Human).
Sources: