Discourse on Decadence Quotes

“To live, and to fall--this is the correct procedure, and can there be any easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside it?”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“We were permitted every freedom, but one might say that when people are permitted every freedom, they become aware of their own inexplicable limits and needs. It is eternally impossible for humans to be free. This is because humans live, and must die, and because they think.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Even if you stabbed the young virgin to death and thereby succeeded in preserving her purity, when once you begin to hear the banal footsteps of decadence, those matter-of-fact footsteps like the endless lapping of waves upon the shore, you cannot help but recognize that the petty nature of human action, the petty nature of that virgins purity thus preserved, is nothing more than a bubble-like, empty illusion.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It seems that the desire to end beautiful things while they are yet beautiful is a general feeling.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is necessary for each of us to fall well. And as with people, so too, Japan too, must fall. We must discover ourselves and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability. Salvation through politics is an absurdity, the mere surface layer of things.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“We fall because we are human, it is only because we live that we fall. But I believe that humans cannot fall utterly. This is because humans cannot retain a steely indifference in the face of suffering. Humans are pitiful, frail, and consequently foolish, but too weak to fall completely.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is impossible to halt the process, and impossible to save humanity by halting it. Humans live and humans fall. There is no easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside this.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Humans don't change. We have only returned to being human.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Humanity. Whatever the terrifying destruction and fatality with which war faces us, it can do nothing to humanity itself.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“War-time Japan was an unbelievable utopia; a certain empty beauty pervaded it throughout. This was not the beauty of human truth. So long as ew forget to think, we can easily find in this sight an unsurpassable show of nonchalance and magnificence. Even with the unceasing fear of bombings, people were always nonchalant just so long as they didn't think and needed only to gave entranced. I too was one of those fools. In all innocence, I was playing with the war,”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“While trembling with fear, I yet gazed enchanted at the beauty. I had no need to think. This was because I saw before me only objects of beauty, not humans.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Japan was defeated, and the samurai ethic has perished, but humanity has been born from the womb of decadences truth.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“To be alive is indeed the supreme mystery.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is not only that creature, history, which is so huge; humanity itself is likewise surprisingly huge.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is impossible to prevent man's downfall.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“There is no way to stop the descent of humans in general from the purity of the "loyal retainer" to mediocrity and then into damnation.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Compared to the banality of decadence, its banal matter-of-factness, one feels that the beauty of those people obedient to destiny, the beauty of the love in the midst of that appalling destruction, was a mere illusion, empty as a bubble.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“The look of the nation since defeat is one of pure and simple decadence.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Grand destruction--it's surprising love.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“In the face of such grand destruction, there was destiny, but there was no decadence. They were innocent, but replete.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Those who had safely escaped through the raging flames now crowded together beside a burning house for warmth against the cold, in a completely separate world from others a mere foot away who were desperately battling to extinguish those same flames.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Perhaps these young girls were unaffected by the present reality because they were filled with dreams of the future, or perhaps it was due to their great vanity.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“They were simply the obedient children of fate.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“As for my ambitions once having survived among the ruins, however, I expected nothing beyond survival itself. Strange rebirth into a new and unforeseeable world.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“When I imagined the American troops landing, and myself holding my breath in the shelter barraged by heavy artillery fire on all sides, I felt the urge to submit to that fate and prepare myself for it. I thought that I might die, but without doubt I more often believed that I would live.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“I cannot stand the sight of blood, and once when there was an automobile accident right in front of my eyes, I wheeled around and fled. Yet, I always liked grand destruction. While trembling at the shells and incendiary bombs, I was at the same time tremendously excited at such frenzied annihilation; and yet I believe that I never loved and longed for human beings more than at that time.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“I completely fail to see what is so attractive about human existence; and yet I cannot but imagine that if I myself were a 60-year old shogun, then I too would be dragged into that courtroom clinging to life, and so in the end I am left feeling astounded at this strange force called life.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is said that death is the end of both flesh and spirit, but I wonder about that. To be honest, I can't go along with the idea that, now that we've lost the war, it is the spirits of our fallen heroes who are most to be pitied.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Beauty left uncompleted is not beauty. It may be that it can be called beauty only when the wretchedness of that inevitable sojourn in damnation can itself be called beauty,”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“The path of literature I have assigned myself is just such an exile in the wilderness,”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence