Yukio Mishima quotes - page 2

I've never done much, but I've lived my whole life thinking of myself as the only real man. And if I'm right, then a limpid, lonely horn is going to trumpet through the dawn some day, and a turgid cloud laced with light will sweep down, and the poignant voice of glory will call for me from the distance - and I'll have to jump out of bed and set out alone. That's why I've never married. I've waited, and waited, and here I am past thirty. (Yukio Mishima)
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Yukio Mishima
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
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
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result.
Yukio Mishima
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
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
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
Yukio Mishima
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
In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away - of their corrosive function - just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. (Yukio Mishima)
As he saw it, there was only one choice - to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.
Yukio Mishima
He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.
Yukio Mishima
How oddly situated a man is apt to find himself at the age of thirty-eight! His youth belongs to the distant past. Yet the period of memory beginning with the end of youth and extending to the present has left him not a single vivid impression. And therefore he persists in feeling that nothing more than a fragile barrier separates him from his youth. He is forever hearing with the utmost clarity the sounds of this neighboring domain, but there is no way to penetrate the barrier.
Yukio Mishima
Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adolescent, by one means or another, tries to open it. The chest is opened: inside, there is nothing. So he reaches a conclusion: the treasure chest is always like this, empty. From this point on, he gives priority to this assumption of his rather than to reality. In other words, he is now a "grown-up."
Yukio Mishima
There is something that even now strikes me as strange. Originally I was not possessed by gloomy thoughts. My concern, what confronted me with my real problem, was beauty alone. But I do not think that the war affected me by filling my mind with gloomy thoughts. 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
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
Yukio Mishima
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one's own heart.
Yukio Mishima
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
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
... of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant. (Yukio Mishima)
a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function', one cog in a machine.
Yukio Mishima
The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
Yukio Mishima
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
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