Mishima Quotes

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“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, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“I want to make a poem of my life.”
― Yukio Mishima

“No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Man always finds the omens he wants.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

“Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“...beauty is not symmetry of parts- that's so impotent -as Mishima says, beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, & finally destroys...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to 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. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I
required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me
believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled
in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications.
A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in
a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death
seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt
myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death.
And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that
had permitted me to survive the war.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Multiple changes in the color of the sea, moment by moment. Changes in the clouds. And the appearance of a ship. What was happening? What were happenings?
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Happenings are the signals for endless reconstruction, reorganization. Signals from a distant bell. A ship appears and sets the bell to ringing. In an instant the sound makes everything its own. On the sea they are incessant, the bell forever ringing.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

“What we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man outside and beyond himself toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls an ineradicable portion of instability from her store of ancient chaos.”
― Stefan Zweig

“She could not help feeling that the sunlight that bathed her there by the back door of the hospital was a shocking waste committed by heaven, now gratuitously inundating the earth.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“He was easily injured and easily influenced by others, and although apparently unable to love, he demanded love from other people; yet, when there was a response, he sheered away.”
― Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima

“It is a truly superb allegory, this story of the Golden Temple: the allegory of evil's revenge, of destruction as the only way out from beauty and the excess of beauty.
But not just beauty. Evil can also befall intelligence.
Intelligence protects us from nothing - not even from stupidity.
Being intelligent is not enough, then, to prevent one from being stupid, and sometimes intelligence even lives in stupidity's shade, and vice versa.
Not only does intelligence not mark the end of stupidity, there is no other way out from excess of intelligence but stupidity. In keeping with an implacable reversibility, stupidity lies in wait for it, as its shadow, as its double.
Only thought, only lucidity, which stands as much opposed to intelligence as to stupidity, can escape this trial of strength.
But there is no rule, no more for good than for evil: they chase each other endlessly around the Moebius strip.
Given the hellish production of collective intelligence, we shall have to reckon in the future with an ever-higher rate of artificial stupidity.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“well as a couple of books I was currently reading—one a notorious novel by an ingenious Russo-American lepidopterist and lover of word-play and literary puzzles, the supreme prose stylist of his era, who wrote with such ardour about a nymphet that other writers works’ appeared as pale fires in comparison, and the other the crowning achievement of a bisexual Japanese genius who committed seppuku  after completing the book I  had on my desk, his blood sending shock waves across the world as it seeped out of his torn belly—”
― Asif Jehangir, The Decay of an Angel