Top 97 Quotes & Sayings by Yukio Mishima

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Japanese author Yukio Mishima.

Last updated on September 17, 2024.

Yukio Mishima , born Kimitake Hiraoka , was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai , an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, but the award went to his countryman and benefactor Yasunari Kawabata. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion , and the autobiographical essay Sun and Steel . Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin.

Japanese - Author | January 14, 1925 - November 25, 1970

Source: Wikipedia

At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it.

Yukio Mishima

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

He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.

Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.

Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. 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

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

Yukio Mishima

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.

Yukio Mishima

I want to make a poem of my life.

Yukio Mishima

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

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.

Yukio Mishima

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.

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

Living is merely the chaos of existence.

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

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

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

Yukio Mishima

In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.

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

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.

Yukio Mishima

Even when we're with someone we love, we're foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self.

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.

Yukio Mishima

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

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

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.

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

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 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

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

Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

Yukio Mishima

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

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

Yukio Mishima

What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity.

Yukio Mishima

I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. The depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others, for they are shallow, commonplace. What is there, then, at the outer most edge? Nothing, perhaps, save a few ribbons, dangling down into the void.

Yukio Mishima

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

…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.

Yukio Mishima

Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming.

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

Yukio Mishima

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

Yukio Mishima