Yukio Mishima Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?

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

A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger

Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

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.

Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.

if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

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

I want to make a poem of my life.

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

It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.

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

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

Living is merely the chaos of existence.

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

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.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

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.

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.

Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?

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.

Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.

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

Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.

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.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.

His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.

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.

I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.

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.

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

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.