Yukio Mishima Quotes

“When a boy… discovers that he is more given into introspection and consciousness of self than other boys his age, he easily falls into the error of believing it is because he is more mature than they. This was certainly a mistake in my case. Rather, it was because the other boys had no such need of understanding themselves as I had: they could be their natural selves, whereas I was to play a part, a fact that would require considerable understanding and study. So it was not my maturity but my sense of uneasiness, my uncertainty that was forcing me to gain control over my consciousness. Because such consciousness was simply a steppingstone to aberration and my present thinking was nothing but uncertain and haphazard guesswork.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“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, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise.
In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.”
― Yukio Mishima, Thirst for Love

“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

“The men who indulged in nocturnal thought, it seemed to me, had without exception dry, lusterless skins and sagging stomachs. They sought to wrap up a whole epoch in a capacious night of ideas, and rejected in all its forms the sun that I had seen. They rejected both life and death as I had seen them, for in both of these the sun had had a hand.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“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

“The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written with a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such a desire.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“At one time, I had been the type of boy who leaned at the window, forever watching out for unexpected events to come crowding in towards him. Though I might be unable to change the world myself, I could not but hope that the world would change of its own accord. As that kind of boy, with all the accompanying anxieties, the transformation of the world was an urgent necessity for me; it nourished me from day to day; it was something without which I could not have lived. The idea of the changing of the world was as much a necessity as sleep and three meals a day. It was the womb that nourished my imagination.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“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

“The soul, you see, is a shy and retiring thing. It lurks in dark places and dislikes sunlight. And so, if you do not keep the skylight open at all times, the soul will rot. It easily decays, like a fresh sea urchin.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Frolic of the Beasts

“I longed for the great sense of relief that death would surely bring if only, like a wrestler, I could wrench the heavy weight of life from my shoulders.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss? Why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, towards the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being’s existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or, whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.”
― Yukio Mishima, Sun & Steel

“Não exagero ao afirmar que o primeiro problema com que me defrontei na vida foi a questão da beleza. Meu pai não passava de um humilde monge provinciano com conhecimentos deficientes de vocabulário. Tudo que ele pôde me ensinar foi que "nada nesse mundo era mais belo que o Pavilhão Dourado". O simples pensamento de que a beleza já existia em algum lugar desconhecido causava-me descontentamento e ansiedade. Porque se de fato ela existisse nesse lugar, então minha própria existência seria algo alheio a ela.”
― Yukio Mishima, 三島 由紀夫

“Procurar placer a una mujer es exponerte a cien sinsabores sin un solo beneficio.”
― Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colors

“First of all, there was a miserable, despairing woman. Then there was a self-indulgent, heartless husband. And last, a hot-blooded, sympathetic young man. And with that the scenario was complete.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Frolic of the Beasts

“Non mi curavo di nulla, e d'altronde nulla si curava di me.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Avevo imparato ad atteggiare le labbra al sorriso di chi la sa lunga sulle vicende del mondo, un sorriso simile a quello di un giovane sacerdote.
Avevo il senso di non essere né vivo né morto.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Il dolore genuino può maturare soltanto a grado a grado. Somiglia strettamente alla tubercolosi, in quanto il male è già progredito e ha raggiunto lo stadio critico prima che il paziente si sia reso conto dei suoi sintomi.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Soggiacevo a quello struggimento, ormai ben attecchito in me, di voler nutrire realmente i sentimenti che mi venivano attribuiti.”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Venne un giorno, agli sgoccioli della primavera, che sembrava lo scampolo che un sarto avesse staccato da una pezza d'estate, oppure una prova in costume della stagione ventura.”
― Yukio Mishima

“Ammesso che la passione umana abbia la virtù d'innalzarsi al disopra di ogni assurdo, come si può sostenere che non abbia anche quella d'innalzarsi al disopra dei propri assurdi?”
― Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

“Beauty, on the other hand, is always on this side. It is in this world, in the present, firm; it can be touched with the hand. That our sexual appetites can taste it is beauty's precondition. Sensuality is, therefore, essential. It confirms beauty. However, beauty can never be reached, because the susceptibilities of sense, more than anything else, block attainment of it. The method by which the Greeks expressed beauty through sculpture was a wise one. I am a novelist. Of all the rubbish that has been invented in the modern times, the profession I have chosen is the worst. Don't you think that for the expression of beauty it is the most bungling and low-class of professions?”
― Yukio Mishima , Forbidden Colors