Top 180 Yukio Mishima Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

104. “I had been handed what might be called a full menu of all the troubles in my life while still too young to read it. But all I had to do was spread my napkin and face the table.”

— Yukio Mishima

105. “Energy is good; lethargy is evil.”

— Yukio Mishima

106. “It’s odd how one’s memories of youth turn out so bleak. Why does the business of growing up – one’s recollections of growth itself – have to be so tragic? I still haven’t found the answer. I doubt if anybody has. When I finally reach that stage at which the placid wisdom of old age... occasionally descends on a person, then I too may suddenly discover that I understand. But I doubt whether, by that time, understanding will have much point.”

— Yukio Mishima

107. “He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply.”

— Yukio Mishima

108. “Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate.”

— Yukio Mishima

109. “Kensuke and his wife had, like all bored people, a sense of kindness that was close to disease.”

— Yukio Mishima

110. “How alike were the voices of pleasure and death!”

— Yukio Mishima

111. “Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.”

— Yukio Mishima

112. “Bu dunyanin uzerine boydan boya yapistirilmis bir “olaniksizlik”etiketi vardir. Ve bu etiketi yirtip atabileceklerin sadece biz oldugunu aklindan cikarma.”

— Yukio Mishima

113. “When we plot the happiness of another, we unconsciously impute to the other person what is in another form the dream in which our own happiness is fulfilled. Thus by not thinking of our own happiness we make it possible for ourselves to become egotistic.”

— Yukio Mishima

114. “She did not know it, but she was actually in despair at the poverty of human emotions. Was it not irrational that there was nothing to do except weep when ten people died, just as one wept for but a single person?”

— Yukio Mishima

115. “The process in which a writer is compelled to counterfeit his true feelings is exactly the opposite of that which the man of society is compelled to counterfeit his. The artist disguises in order to reveal; the man of society disguises in order to conceal.”

— Yukio Mishima

116. “In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature’s various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.”

— Yukio Mishima

117. “Human beings – they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It’s kind of boring, isn’t it?”

— Yukio Mishima

118. “I discovered how our hearts, as though infected with some malignant virus, were being eaten away by the uneasy awakening that was brazenly intruding upon our dream, by the futile pleasure of our dream seen at the threshold of consciousness.”

— Yukio Mishima

119. “We human beings sometimes steer off in a direction in which we hope to find something a little bit better.”

— Yukio Mishima

120. “Even though the world might change into the kind I hoped for, it lost its rich charm at the very instant of change. The thing that lay at the far end of my dreams was extreme danger and destruction; never once had I envisaged happiness. 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

121. “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 the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.”

— Yukio Mishima

122. “Once I had started my solitude I realised anew that it was easy for me to become accustomed to this state and that the most effortless existence for me was in fact one in which I was not obliged to speak to anyone. My fretful attitude to life left me. Each dead day had its charm.”

— Yukio Mishima

123. “It seemed that hell could appear day or night, at any time, at any place, simply in response to one’s thoughts or wishes. It seemed that we could summon it at our pleasure and that instantly it would appear.”

— Yukio Mishima

124. “Those who lack imagination have no choice but to base their conclusions on the reality they see around them. But on the other hand, those who are imaginative have a tendency to build fortified castles they have designed themselves, and to seal off every window in them.”

— Yukio Mishima

125. “For the average man, driven as he is by lurid fantasies, there is almost nothing more deliciously titillating than the contemplation, from a safe distance, of evil laid out in its cause and effect.”

— Yukio Mishima

126. “Most people are always doubtful as to whether they are happy or not, cheerful or not. This is the normal state of happiness, as doubt is a most natural thing.”

— Yukio Mishima

127. “A woman is never so drunk with happiness as when she discovers desire in the eyes of a man.”

— Yukio Mishima

128. “Oddly enough, living only for one’s emotions, like a flag obedient to the breeze, demands a way of life that makes one balk at the natural course of events, for this implies being altogether subservient to nature. The life of the emotions detests all constraints, whatever their origin, and thus, ironically enough, is apt eventually to fetter its own instinctive sense of freedom.”

— Yukio Mishima

129. “But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for tormenting myself. This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy.”

— Yukio Mishima

130. “Life strove mightily to exile orthodoxy, hospitalize heresy, and trap humanity into stupidity. It was an accumulation of used bandages soiled with layers of blood and pus. Life was the daily changing of the bandages of the heart that made the incurably sick, young and old alike, cry out in pain.”

— Yukio Mishima

131. “Il sole del pomeriggio batteva senza sosta la superficie del mare, e tutta la baia er a un’unica, stupenda distesa di fulgore. All’orizzonte campeggiavano alcune nuvole estive, ferme nel silenzio, immergendo parzialmente in acqua le forme sontuose, funeree, profetiche. I muscoli delle nuvole erano pallidi come alabastro.”

— Yukio Mishima

132. “Life struck us as being a strangely volatile thing. It was exactly as though life were a salt lake from which most of the water had suddenly evaporated, leaving such a heavy concentration of salt that our bodies floated buoyantly upon its surface.”

— Yukio Mishima

133. “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

134. “That is because the most subtle and delicate wishes of evil are not for a physical wound but for a spiritual.”

— Yukio Mishima

135. “Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer’s work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima’s carefully premeditated death is part of his work.”

— Yukio Mishima

136. “He never made fun of her as her neighbors did. That was why she visited him. He felt in this mad, ugly woman five years his senior a comrade in apartness. He liked people who refused to recognize the world.”

— Yukio Mishima

137. “No one can know what a sacrifice it is for me to be gentle and docile.”

— Yukio Mishima

138. “I think it’s a wonderful song,” she said. But she was only shielding his pride, he knew. Obviously this was the first time she had ever heard the song, though she pretended to know it well. She can’t penetrate to the feelings deep down in a song like this; or see through the murk of my manhood to the longing that sometimes makes me weep; fair enough: then as far as I’m concerned, she’s just another body.”

— Yukio Mishima

139. “If the cause of decay was illness, then the fundamental cause of that, the flesh, was illness too. The essence of the flesh was decay. It had its spot in time to give evidence of destruction and decay.”

— Yukio Mishima

140. “Surely, I thought, we do not deserve even a little happiness. Or perhaps we had acquired the bad habit of regarding even a little happiness as a big favor, which we would have to repay.”

— Yukio Mishima

141. “Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?”

— Yukio Mishima

142. “To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous.”

— Yukio Mishima

143. “Existences and events occurring without any relationship to myself, occurring at places that not only appealed to my senses but were moreover denied to me – these, together with the people involved in them, constituted my definition of “tragic things.” It seemed that my grief at being eternally excluded was always transformed in my dreaming into grief for those persons and their ways of life, and that solely through my own grief I was trying to share in their existences.”

— Yukio Mishima

144. “True pain can only come gradually. It is exactly like tuberculosis in that the disease has already progressed to a critical stage before the patient becomes aware of its symptoms.”

— Yukio Mishima

145. “They avoided talk of the old days, like a pair weaving in and out among puddles after a rainstorm, so deftly that neither of them found the process awkward.”

— Yukio Mishima

146. “Man does not live simply in order to die.”

— Yukio Mishima

147. “If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first – having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds – supply other means to abstraction instead.”

— Yukio Mishima

148. “Dreams, memories, the sacred – they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. 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

149. “Beings in existence thus are annihilated from moment to moment, and this gives rise to time. The process whereby time is engendered by this moment-to-moment annihilation may be likened to a row of dots and a line.”

— Yukio Mishima

150. “For ideas are, in the long run, essentially foreign to human existence; and the body – receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control – is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such.”

— Yukio Mishima