Top 180 Yukio Mishima Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A person who has been seriously wounded does not demand that the bandages that save his life be clean.”

— Yukio Mishima

52. “Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”

— Yukio Mishima

53. “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

54. “Just now I had a dream. I’ll see you again. I know it. Beneath the falls.”

— Yukio Mishima

55. “For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.”

— Yukio Mishima

56. “Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.”

— Yukio Mishima

57. “The path we’re taking is not a road, Kiyo, it’s a pier, and it ends someplace where the sea begins. It can’t be helped.”

— Yukio Mishima

58. “I hope that I am making myself understood. The Golden Temple once more appeared before me. Or rather, I should say that the breast was transformed into the Golden Temple.”

— Yukio Mishima

59. “By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.”

— Yukio Mishima

60. “The only people in this world I really trust are my fans – even if they do forget you so fast.”

— Yukio Mishima

61. “Blood and flowers were alike, Isao thought, in that both were quick to dry up, quick to change their substance. And precisely because of this, then, blood and flowers could go on living by taking on the substance of glory. Glory in all its form was inevitably something metallic.”

— Yukio Mishima

62. “Separation is painful, but so is its opposite. And if being together brings joy, then it is only proper that separation should do the same in its own way.”

— Yukio Mishima

63. “The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”

— Yukio Mishima

64. “A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”

— Yukio Mishima

65. “Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?”

— Yukio Mishima

66. “In modern society the meaning of death is constantly being forgotten. No, it is not forgotten; rather, the subject is avoided.”

— Yukio Mishima

67. “A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn’t even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.”

— Yukio Mishima

68. “You’re not human. You’re a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You’re nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic.”

— Yukio Mishima

69. “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

70. “Ordinary life is even more horrible than war.”

— Yukio Mishima

71. “Only knowledge can turn life’s unbearableness into a weapon.”

— Yukio Mishima

72. “A hidden poetry that will be lost if any mediocrity is shed. Genius is a casualty. The poetry must never be conspicuous – its scent is only detectable when subtle.”

— Yukio Mishima

73. “No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.”

— Yukio Mishima

74. “That which proceeds from a man’s soul shall shape his soul; that which proceeds from his speech shall shape his speech, and deeds that proceed from his body shall shape his body.”

— Yukio Mishima

75. “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

76. “Before long, my blood would not permit a halt of even a day or two. Something ceaselessly set me to work; my body could no longer tolerate indolence, but began instantly to thirst for violent action, forever urging me on. Thus for many a day I led a life that others might well dismiss as frenzied obsession.”

— Yukio Mishima

77. “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

78. “In his heart, he always preferred the actuality of loss to the fear of it.”

— Yukio Mishima

79. “What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given.”

— Yukio Mishima

80. “The elements of intoxication and superhuman clarity in the tragic are born when the average sensibility, endowed with a given physical strength, encounters that type of privileged moment especially designed for it. Tragedy calls for an anti-tragic vitality and ignorance, and above all for a certain “inappropriateness.” If a person is at times to draw close to the divine, then under normal conditions he must be neither divine nor anything approaching it.”

— Yukio Mishima

81. “Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it.”

— Yukio Mishima

82. “Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness – amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko’s treachery.”

— Yukio Mishima

83. “Most writers are perfectly normal in the head and just carry on like wild men; I behave normally but I’m sick inside.”

— Yukio Mishima

84. “An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.”

— Yukio Mishima

85. “Someone once said that homosexuals have on their faces a certain loneliness that will not come off.”

— Yukio Mishima

86. “His occupation gave me the feeling of “tragedy” in the most sensuous meaning of the word. A certain feeling as it were of “self-renunciation,” a certain feeling of indifference, a certain feeling of intimacy with danger, a feeling like a remarkable mixture of nothingness and vital power – all these feelings swarmed forth from his calling, bore down upon me, and took me captive, at the age of four.”

— Yukio Mishima

87. “When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for 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.”

— Yukio Mishima

88. “Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life?”

— Yukio Mishima

89. “He wanted to talk about the strange passion that catches hold of a man by the scruff of his neck and transports him to a realm beyond the fear of death.”

— Yukio Mishima

90. “I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.”

— Yukio Mishima

91. “His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.”

— Yukio Mishima

92. “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

93. “According to Eshin’s Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.”

— Yukio Mishima

94. “For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.”

— Yukio Mishima

95. “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

96. “Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning ‘love’ in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition. Presently I came to realize that my conviction – the conviction that I could never be loved-was itself the basic state of human existence.”

— Yukio Mishima

97. “And one clouded stream that never ran dry was that choked with the scum of humanism, the poison spewed out by the factory at its headwaters. There it was: its lights burning brilliantly as it worked even through the night – the factory of Western European ideals. The pollution from that factory degraded the exalted fervor to kill; it withered the green of the sakaki’s leaves.”

— Yukio Mishima

98. “I was born with gloomy nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at ease.”

— Yukio Mishima

99. “One could certainly think of a man not in terms of a body but as a single vital current. And this would allow one to grasp the concept of existence as dynamic and on-going, rather than as static.”

— Yukio Mishima

100. “He radiated the innocence that marks the absolute rejection of prudence.”

— Yukio Mishima