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Yukio Mishima

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Famous Yukio Mishima Quotes

“The purest evil that human efforts could attain, in other words, was probably achieved by those men who made their wills the same and who made their eyes see the world in the same way, men who went against the pattern of life's diversity, men whose spirits shattered the natural wall of the individual body, making nothing of this barrier, set up to guard against mutual corrosion, men whose spirit accomplished what flesh could never accomplish.”

MenWorldWayHumansMadeBodyEyeSpiritEvilIndividualNaturalEffortWallDiversityPatternsAccomplishFleshAccomplishedBarriersMutualShattered
Author:Yukio Mishima
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“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.”

MenDreamMemoriesQualityObjectsStrangeSourceMiracleSacredAcquireMiraculousUnattainableSacrednessStrange Man
Book:Spring Snow
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“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.”

MenWayKindPersonsArtUseMy OwnEnemyWeaponsWeaknessTransformationIndividualityDespiteNeverthelessInsectsArbitraryDescendingSwarmsUniversalityUsing Words
Author:Yukio Mishima
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“..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions; that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it; that propagation was a fiction; consequently, society was a fiction too; that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.”

MenMomentsCertainFatherWaterSinSimpleDecisionFictionVirtueTeacherBirthRootsGuiltySignalsBeing A FatherRecoursePropagation
Author:Yukio Mishima
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“…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.”

MenLooksHeartImportantSeemsPoliticalOrderViewsSpecialMoralityHealthyEthicsMalesSupremeVanityPeculiarDaringManhoodFatiguePolitical ScienceDiscouragementSamurai
Author:Yukio Mishima
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“Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we’re unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they’ll be talking about you and me. We’ll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.”

PeopleMenWayMatterTogetherYoungTalkingPeriodsDecadesErasYoung ManDespiseMainstreamEntityWhat MattersTime Goes By
Book:Spring Snow
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“Isao had never felt that he might want to be a woman. He had never wished for anything else but to be a man, live in a manly way, die a manly death. To be thus a man was to give constant proof of one's manliness-to be more a man today than yesterday, more a man tomorrow than today. To be a man was to forge ever upward toward the peak of manhood, there to die amid the white snows of that peak.”

MenWayWantGivingMightTodayDiesFeltWhiteTomorrowConstantProofYesterdaySnowManhoodBe A ManManlyManliness
Book:Runaway Horses
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