Yukio Mishima Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Art, Men, Ordinary

  Yukio Mishima (1969). “Thirst for love”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  91 Copy quote

• We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

  Yukio Mishima

  Age, Heroic, Heroic Death

  9 Copy quote

• Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.

  Yukio Mishima

  Blood, Perfect, Lines

  "Runaway Horses". Book by Yukio Mishima, 1969.

  104 Copy quote

• True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.

  Yukio Mishima

  True Beauty

  102 Copy quote

• As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.

  Yukio Mishima

  Spring, Flower, Long

  41 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Memories, Men

  Yukio Mishima (1990). “Spring Snow”, Vintage

  95 Copy quote

• Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.

  Yukio Mishima

  Hands

  84 Copy quote

• Living is merely the chaos of existence.

  Yukio Mishima

  Chaos, Existence

  13 Copy quote

• Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.

  Yukio Mishima

  Lying, Heart, Imagine

  Yukio Mishima (1969). “Thirst for love”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  90 Copy quote

• 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

  Ideas, People, Done

  Yukio Mishima (2010). “After The Banquet”, p.10, Random House

  88 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Leaving, Looks

  "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion". Book by Yukio Mishima, 1959.

  95 Copy quote

• When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

  Yukio Mishima

  Silence, Periods, Certain

  Yukio Mishima (1969). “Thirst for love”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

  40 Copy quote

• For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.

  Yukio Mishima

  Creativity, Artist, Ill Health

  66 Copy quote

• The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

  Yukio Mishima

  Special, Quality, Details

  Yukio Mishima (2011). “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”, p.92, Tuttle Publishing

  78 Copy quote

• Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

  Yukio Mishima

  Cancer, Imagination, Caught

  Yukio Mishima, Cecilia Segawa Seigle (1974). “The temple of dawn”, Harvill Secker

  10 Copy quote

• Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.

  Yukio Mishima

  Forever, Life Is, Human Life

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  May, Dignity, Ifs

  Yukio Mishima (1977). “The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern Life”, Basic Books (AZ)

  9 Copy quote

• To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.

  Yukio Mishima

  Beautiful, Spring, Humble

  Yukio Mishima (2011). “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”, p.95, Tuttle Publishing

  41 Copy quote

• If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss.

  Yukio Mishima

  Loss, Dark, Clouds

  "Runaway Horses".

  54 Copy quote

• The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority

  Yukio Mishima

  Hero, Inferiority, Worship

  15 Copy quote

• I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.

  Yukio Mishima

  Fighting, Victory, Taste

  "Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death". Book by Yukio Mishima, 1970.

  21 Copy quote

• Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.

  Yukio Mishima

  Pain, Lying, Doubt

  11 Copy quote

• Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant. You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

  Yukio Mishima

  Jobs, Crazy, Real

  32 Copy quote

• Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

  Yukio Mishima

  Results, Standpoint

  Yukio Mishima (2011). “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”, p.165, Tuttle Publishing

  63 Copy quote

• When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.

  Yukio Mishima

  Two, People, Captivity

  47 Copy quote

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