Top 100 Yukio Mishima Quotes
#1. He was a ship loaded down with a full cargo of emotion, riding low in the dark winter sea of death. Isao
Yukio Mishima
#2. But this girl simply let my hands gather on her own small, plump hands, like flies gathering on someone who is taking a nap.
Yukio Mishima
#3. I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.
Yukio Mishima
#4. Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.
Yukio Mishima
#5. Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Yukio Mishima
#6. For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world's order is inevitably turned awry.
Yukio Mishima
#7. What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.
Yukio Mishima
#8. When we plot the happiness of another, we unconsciously impute to the other person what is in another form the dream in which our own happiness is fulfilled. Thus by not thinking of our own happiness we make it possible for ourselves to become egotistic.
Yukio Mishima
#9. All of this caused Kiyoaki constant pain. In comparison with Satoko's public humiliation, however, he did not even have a slighting remark to contend with. And however acute his private agony, it was, after all, the torment of a coward.
Yukio Mishima
#10. At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it.
Yukio Mishima
#11. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and the absolute skies of early autumn. Those blue skies though, were unusual skies that I might never see again in my life.
Yukio Mishima
#13. A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.
Yukio Mishima
#14. Blood and flowers were alike, Isao thought, in that both were quick to dry up, quick to change their substance. And precisely because of this, then, blood and flowers could go on living by taking on the substance of glory. Glory in all its form was inevitably something metallic.
Yukio Mishima
#15. He heard the sound of waves striking the shore, and it was as though the surging of his young blood was keeping time with the movement of the sea's great tides. It was doubtless because nature itself satisfied his need that Shinji felt no particular lack of music in his everyday life.
Yukio Mishima
#16. Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I'm sick inside.
Yukio Mishima
#17. Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing. It was exactly as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a heavy concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface.
Yukio Mishima
#18. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.
Yukio Mishima
#19. For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.
Yukio Mishima
#20. Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed ...
Yukio Mishima
#22. Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one's own desires.
Yukio Mishima
#23. I was born with gloomy nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at ease.
Yukio Mishima
#24. If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in.
There are some truths in this world that one cannot see unless one unbends one's posture.
Yukio Mishima
#25. No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.
Yukio Mishima
#26. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
Yukio Mishima
#27. Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.
Yukio Mishima
#28. All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.
Yukio Mishima
#29. For me, beauty is always retreating from one's grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed.
Yukio Mishima
#30. I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.
Yukio Mishima
#31. When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
Yukio Mishima
#32. All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
Yukio Mishima
#33. Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks.
I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal clear eyes ...
From that time on I was in love with Omi.
Yukio Mishima
#34. It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
#35. He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has.
Yukio Mishima
#36. Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.
Yukio Mishima
#37. Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
#38. You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.
Yukio Mishima
#39. Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
#40. Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.
Yukio Mishima
#41. The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.
Yukio Mishima
#42. True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.
Yukio Mishima
#43. The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.
Yukio Mishima
#44. Somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation.
Yukio Mishima
#45. History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.
Yukio Mishima
#46. No one's words can compete with this mercilessly powerful rain. The only thing that can compete with the sound of this rain, that can smash this deathlike wall of sound, is the shout of a man who refuses to stoop to this chatter, the shout of a simple spirit that knows no words.
Yukio Mishima
#48. It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one's thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.
Yukio Mishima
#49. So far as feelings were concerned, there was no discrepancy between the very finest feeling in this world and the very worst; that their effect was the same; that no visible difference existed between murderous intent and feelings of deep compassion.
Yukio Mishima
#50. That was mere probing, my eye was really turned on an invisible realm far beyond the horizon. What is it to see the invisible? That is the ultimate vision, the denial at the end of all seeing, the eye's denial of itself.
Yukio Mishima
#51. Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Yukio Mishima
#52. He radiated the innocence that marks the absolute rejection of prudence.
Yukio Mishima
#53. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
Yukio Mishima
#54. ... In the very simplicity of her desire to punish herself appeared egoism in its purest form. Never before had this woman who seemed to think only of herself experienced an egoism so immaculate.
Yukio Mishima
#55. A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.
Yukio Mishima
#57. I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
Yukio Mishima
#58. I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed into the Golden Temple.
Yukio Mishima
#59. But there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.
Yukio Mishima
#60. Because the fact of not being understood by other people had become my only real source of pride, I was never confronted by any impulse to express things and to make others understand something that I knew.
Yukio Mishima
#61. She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?
Yukio Mishima
#62. Somehow the habit of eating had never appeared so ridiculous to me, and I rubbed my eyes. Presently I realized that my point of view came from having completely lost the desire to live.
Yukio Mishima
#63. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horse racing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.
Yukio Mishima
#64. He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.
Yukio Mishima
#65. To defile yourself, yet not really be defiled - that's true purity. If you're fastidious about defilement, you're not going to do anything. You'll never become a real man,
Yukio Mishima
#66. Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
Yukio Mishima
#67. One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.
Yukio Mishima
#68. By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.
Yukio Mishima
#69. The path we're taking is not a road, Kiyo, it's a pier, and it ends someplace where the sea begins. It can't be helped.
Yukio Mishima
#70. The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
Yukio Mishima
#71. In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.
Yukio Mishima
#72. There's the matter of picking the time. There's such a thing as the favorable moment. Determination alone counts for nothing.
Yukio Mishima
#73. Ever since then violent anticipation has always been an anguish rather than joy for me.
Yukio Mishima
#74. The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
#75. We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise.
In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.
Yukio Mishima
#76. For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.
Yukio Mishima
#77. True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Yukio Mishima
#78. I come out on the stage expecting the audience to weep, and instead they burst out laughing.
Yukio Mishima
#79. Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work.
Yukio Mishima
#80. This time, Fusako was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her an unexpected new freedom.
Yukio Mishima
#81. Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
Yukio Mishima
#82. Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.
Yukio Mishima
#83. Everybody's the same. People are all the same. But it's the prerogative of youth to think it's not so.
Yukio Mishima
#84. There's no doubt that he's heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty--like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?
Yukio Mishima
#85. The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have. Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.
Yukio Mishima
#86. As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
Yukio Mishima
#87. Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
Yukio Mishima
#88. It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
Yukio Mishima
#89. An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Yukio Mishima
#90. ... Her desire was close to that of the person who drowns himself; he does not necessarily covet death so much as what comes after the drowning - something different from what he had before, at least a different world.
Yukio Mishima
#91. Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain.
Yukio Mishima
#92. Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.
Yukio Mishima
#93. Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.
Yukio Mishima
#94. Of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Yukio Mishima
#95. Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
Yukio Mishima
#96. Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
#97. Still, the loss of something is significant, and I think that loss is the necessary source of a new manifestation.
Yukio Mishima
#98. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.
Yukio Mishima
#99. According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.
Yukio Mishima
#100. He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.
Yukio Mishima
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