Yukio Mishima Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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 -
“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room - a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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 -
“Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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 -
“Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“I had no taste for defeat — much less victory — without a fight.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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 -
“We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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 -
“Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.”
-- Yukio Mishima -
“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