Yukio Mishima: Trending quotes

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“I want to make a poem of my life.”

“Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai must be the soul of Japan. … The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan. … I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!”

“History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.”

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

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

“He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.”

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

“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.”

“… 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….”

“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.”

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”

“… living is merely the chaos of existence…”

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

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