Yukio Mishima Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Living is merely the chaos of existence.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.