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Yukio Mishima Quotes about Art

All Yukio Mishima Quotes Age Art quotes Desire Dying Giving Lying Memories Pain Reality Spring Writing
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.

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

It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.

Yukio Mishima
Art, Records, Photograph

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
Art, Truth, Flower
Yukio Mishima (1966). “Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories”, p.61, New Directions Publishing

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

Yukio Mishima
Art, Men, Individuality

This is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies and no deceptions. One can detect here, elevated to an incomparably higher level, the same pathetic emotional appeal that lies concealed in every fake spiritualist photograph, every pornographic photograph; one comes to suspect that the strange, disturbing emotional appeal of the photographic art consists solely in that same repeated refrain: this is a true ghost... this is a photograph, so it is as you see: there are no lies, no deceptions.

Yukio Mishima
Art, Lying, Emotional

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