Top 180 Yukio Mishima Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.”

— Yukio Mishima

2. “I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.”

— Yukio Mishima

3. “I want to make a poem of my life.”

— Yukio Mishima

4. “As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.”

— Yukio Mishima

5. “Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.”

— Yukio Mishima

6. “Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

8. “If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.”

— Yukio Mishima

9. “I had no taste for defeat – much less victory – without a fight.”

— Yukio Mishima

10. “Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”

— Yukio Mishima

11. “When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”

— Yukio Mishima

12. “Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

14. “There’s a huge seal called ‘impossibility’ pasted all over this world. And don’t ever forget that we’re the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

16. “Man always finds the omens he wants.”

— Yukio Mishima

17. “You were so beautiful when you wanted to die. When you wanted to live, you became so ugly.”

— Yukio Mishima

18. “For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

20. “It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.”

— Yukio Mishima

21. “Everybody’s the same. People are all the same. But it’s the prerogative of youth to think it’s not so.”

— Yukio Mishima

22. “It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.”

— Yukio Mishima

23. “At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.”

— Yukio Mishima

24. “But there is no such thing as individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence.”

— Yukio Mishima

25. “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.”

— Yukio Mishima

26. “The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

28. “With a heart unaccustomed to doubting, he never wondered for an instant whether the girl would brave such a storm to keep their rendezvous. He knew nothing of that melancholy and all-too-effective way of passing time by magnifying and complicating his feelings, whether of happiness or uneasiness, through the exercise of imagination.”

— Yukio Mishima

29. “It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.”

— Yukio Mishima

30. “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’.”

— Yukio Mishima

31. “I believe that just as physical training will transform supposedly involuntary muscles into voluntary ones, so a similar transformation can be achieved through training the mind. Both body and mind, through an inevitable tendency that one might almost call a natural law, are inclined to lapse into automatism, but I have found by experience that a large stream may be deflected by digging a small channel.”

— Yukio Mishima

32. “The measure of a woman’s power is the degree of suffering with which she can punish her lover.”

— Yukio Mishima

33. “The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”

— Yukio Mishima

34. “All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.”

— Yukio Mishima

35. “Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”

— Yukio Mishima

36. “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.”

— Yukio Mishima

37. “There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.”

— Yukio Mishima

38. “The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”

— Yukio Mishima

Featured in: Strong Quotes

39. “Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger.”

— Yukio Mishima

40. “Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.”

— Yukio Mishima

41. “We all know that the world is empty and that the important thing, the only thing, is to try to maintain order in that emptiness.”

— Yukio Mishima

42. “For me, beauty is always retreating from one’s grasp: the only thing I consider important is what existed once, or ought to have existed. By its subtle, infinitely varied operation, the steel restored the classical balance that the body had begun to lose, reinstating it in its natural form, the form that it should have had all along.”

— Yukio Mishima

43. “The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction; peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.”

— Yukio Mishima

44. “Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result.”

— Yukio Mishima

45. “If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss. You have to turn into a dragon and stir up a whirlwind, tear the dark, brooding clouds asunder and soar up into the azure-blue sky.”

— Yukio Mishima

46. “The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.”

— Yukio Mishima

47. “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.”

— Yukio Mishima

48. “He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has.”

— Yukio Mishima

49. “Within those confining walls, teachers – a bunch of men all armed with the same information – gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.”

— Yukio Mishima

50. “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.”

— Yukio Mishima