Top 100 Yukio Mishima Quotes
#1. Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
#2. There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
Yukio Mishima
#3. 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
#4. Somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation.
Yukio Mishima
#5. 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
#6. The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.
Yukio Mishima
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. As long as conscious desire is at work, it will permit distinctions to exist. But if one can suppress it, these distinctions dissolve and one can be as content with a skull as with anything else.
Yukio Mishima
#10. Just now I had a dream. I'll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.
Yukio Mishima
#11. Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
#12. 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
#13. Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Yukio Mishima
#14. 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
#15. Human beings, Isao realized, could descend to communicating their feelings like dogs barking in the distance on a cold night.
Yukio Mishima
#16. He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has.
Yukio Mishima
#17. It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
#18. 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
#19. And it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.
Yukio Mishima
#20. The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority
Yukio Mishima
#21. If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.
Yukio Mishima
#22. The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
Yukio Mishima
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
Yukio Mishima
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
Yukio Mishima
#31. I've known supreme happiness, and I'm not greedy enough to want what I have to go on forever. Every dream ends. Wouldn't it be foolish, knowing that nothing lasts forever, to insist that one has a right to do something that does?
[ ... ]but, if eternity existed, it would be this moment.
Yukio Mishima
#32. 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
#33. Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
Yukio Mishima
#34. 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
#35. The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
Yukio Mishima
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#41. 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
#42. ... 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
#43. 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
#44. He radiated the innocence that marks the absolute rejection of prudence.
Yukio Mishima
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
Yukio Mishima
#49. 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
#51. 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
#52. Again, Saburo Tominaga once went to the Shirakawa Prefectural Office to cash his brother Morikuni's bonus bond and, unwilling to touch paper currency defiled with a foreign-style design, carried it home between chopsticks.
Yukio Mishima
#53. I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line ...
Yukio Mishima
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous
Yukio Mishima
#57. Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.
Yukio Mishima
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty?
Yukio Mishima
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. The measure of a woman's power is the degree of suffering with which she can punish her lover.
Yukio Mishima
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world's order is inevitably turned awry.
Yukio Mishima
#68. Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Yukio Mishima
#69. It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
Yukio Mishima
#70. 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
#71. In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.
Yukio Mishima
#72. They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.
Yukio Mishima
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.
Yukio Mishima
#76. 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
#77. All six of us are geniuses. And the world, as you know, is empty.
Yukio Mishima
#78. When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
Yukio Mishima
#79. There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might even be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Yukio Mishima
#80. More than anything else, Kiyoaki thought, more than Princess Chan, the emerald ring, their friends, their school, perhaps what the princes had needed had been sunshine. It seemed that summer had the power to heal all frustrations, soothe every grief, restore their lost happiness.
Yukio Mishima
#81. The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.
Yukio Mishima
#82. Beyond doubt it would speedily verify the proverb that a nation must ravage itself before foreigners can ravage it, a man must despise himself before others can despise him.
Yukio Mishima
#84. 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
#85. For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
Yukio Mishima
#86. No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.
Yukio Mishima
#87. 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
#88. The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal
Yukio Mishima
#89. He was a ship loaded down with a full cargo of emotion, riding low in the dark winter sea of death. Isao
Yukio Mishima
#90. Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one's own desires.
Yukio Mishima
#91. Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see the blood, but actually by the time that the blood has been shed the tragedy has already completed.
Yukio Mishima
#92. Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one's own heart.
Yukio Mishima
#93. Her nose was perfect; her lips exquisite. Like a master placing a go stone on the board after long deliberation, he placed the details of her beauty one by one in the misty dark and drew back to savour them.
Yukio Mishima
#95. Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed ...
Yukio Mishima
#96. How dearly, indeed, I loved my pit, my dusky room, the area of my desk with its piles of books! How I enjoyed introspection, shrouded myself in cogitation; with what rapture did I listen for the rustling of frail insects in the thickets of my nerves!
Yukio Mishima
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Reiko had not kept a diary and was now denied the pleasure of assiduously rereading her record of the happiness of the past few months and consigning each page to the fire as she did so.
- Death in Midsummer and Other Stories
Yukio Mishima
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