Top 180 Yukio Mishima Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We had stretched out our arms to each other and supported something in our joined hands, but this thing we were holding was like a sort of gas that exists when you believe in its existence and disappears when you doubt. The task of supporting it seems simple at first glance, but actually requires an ultimate refinement of calculation and a consummate skill.”

— Yukio Mishima

152. “Prudery is a form of selfishness, a means of self-protection made necessary by the strength of one’s own desires.”

— Yukio Mishima

153. “His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions – gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.”

— Yukio Mishima

154. “Ever since those days this has been the attitude with which I have always confronted life: from things too much waited for, too much embellished with anticipatory daydreams, there is in the end nothing I can do but run away.”

— Yukio Mishima

155. “For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world’s order is inevitably turned awry.”

— Yukio Mishima

156. “I somehow looked forward to death impatiently, with a sweet expectation. As i have remarked several times, the future was a heavy burden for me. From the very beginning, life has oppressed me with a heavy sense of duty. Even though i was clearly incapable of performing this duty, life still nagged at me for my dereliction. Thus 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

157. “A man may be hard to persuade by rational argument while he is easily swayed by a display of passion, even if it is feigned.”

— Yukio Mishima

158. “There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.”

— Yukio Mishima

159. “I had a presentiment then that there is in this world a kind of desire like stinging pain. Looking up at that dirty youth, I was choked by desire, thinking, ‘I want to change into him’, thinking, ‘I want to be him’.”

— Yukio Mishima

160. “Besides, like a man who knows he is dying, he felt a need to be equally tender to all.”

— Yukio Mishima

161. “The Chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.”

— Yukio Mishima

162. “And in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.”

— Yukio Mishima

163. “I had perceived dimly, too, that the only physical proof of the existence of consciousness was suffering. Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.”

— Yukio Mishima

164. “He longed for a storm. But life aboard ship taught him only the regularity of natural law and the dynamic stability of the wobbling world.”

— Yukio Mishima

165. “A person who has never known happiness has no right to scorn it.”

— Yukio Mishima

166. “Soggiacevo a quello struggimento, ormai ben attecchito in me, di voler nutrire realmente i sentimenti che mi venivano attribuiti.”

— Yukio Mishima

167. “Cruel separation guarded the purity of emotion. The pangs of being apart were transformed into quiet joy. Danger aroused the sensual. Uncertainty fostered dreams.”

— Yukio Mishima

168. “Ever since then violent anticipation has always been an anguish rather than joy for me.”

— Yukio Mishima

169. “But then another thought occurred to me: if we grant that human passion has the power to rise above all absurdity, how can it be argued that it does not have the power to rise above the absurdities of passion itself?”

— Yukio Mishima

170. “Noboru tried to compare the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with what might have seemed the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor; by comparison, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvellous hom and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated as deeply as this... the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.”

— Yukio Mishima

171. “It’s not so much the harming of people’s bodies I find objectionable, but of their hearts.”

— Yukio Mishima

172. “There’s no doubt that he’s heading straight for tragedy. It will be beautiful, of course, but should he throw his whole life away as a sacrificial offering to such a fleeting beauty – like a bird in flight glimpsed from a window?”

— Yukio Mishima

173. “The cynics – well aware that there is nobody who despises the imagination so thoroughly as the dreamer.”

— Yukio Mishima

174. “Ordinary bourgeois life held no force sufficiently compelling to drag one out into the chill drizzle without so much as an umbrella.”

— Yukio Mishima

175. “And the trap into which the deformed person finally falls does not lie in his resolving the state of antagonism between himself and the world, but instead takes the form of his completely approving of this antagonism. That’s why a deformed person can never really be cured.”

— Yukio Mishima

176. “Daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism.”

— Yukio Mishima

177. “To say human life had no meaning was the easy part. But Hanio was struck all over again by the huge amount of energy required to live a life filled with so much meaninglessness.”

— Yukio Mishima

178. “La infancia es un periodo en el que el tiempo y el espacio se mezclan.”

— Yukio Mishima

179. “People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.”

— Yukio Mishima

180. “Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I had asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. 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? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty?”

— Yukio Mishima

181. “I was mistaking the fierce, impossible desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual desire of a man of the world, for the desire that arises from his being himself.”

— Yukio Mishima

182. “Those who believe, believe everything, while those who doubt don’t believe a thing.”

— Yukio Mishima

183. “His friends were probably right when they called it a pitiful little vacant house. He wondered if that had anything to do with the emptiness of his own world.”

— Yukio Mishima

184. “A dead body reminds me a bit of a bottle of whisky. If you drop the bottle and it cracks, what’s inside pours out. It’s only natural.”

— Yukio Mishima

185. “Well, that’s what they do on television. Every fifteen minutes, there are breaks for commercials. That way we get to look forward to what’s coming next. That’s how it works in real life too.”

— Yukio Mishima

186. “My conscience was pricked by the happiness of being loved. Or perhaps I was craving some still more decisive unhappiness.”

— Yukio Mishima

187. “So then, this image of a lukewarm man that Sonoko was now seeing, this thing that appeared to be my character, aroused my disgust, made my entire existence seem worthless, and tore my self-confidence into shreds. I was made to distrust both my will and my character, or at least, so far as my will was concerned, I could not believe it was anything but a fake.”

— Yukio Mishima

188. “It’s only the desire to live as long as possible that makes everything seem complicated and mysterious.”

— Yukio Mishima

189. “To be half-clever was the worst I could have done.”

— Yukio Mishima

190. “My reason for proposing the game also lay in my inverted sense of social duty: in short, I felt that I must not fawn upon the girls, but must somehow give them a hard time.”

— Yukio Mishima

191. “At such times I felt as though I was drenched up to my neck in the existence that was myself.”

— Yukio Mishima

192. “Non mi curavo di nulla, e d’altronde nulla si curava di me.”

— Yukio Mishima

193. “I was like a person who has been suffering an unknown disease in an agony of fear: just learning the name of his disease, even though it is an incurable one, gives him a surprising feeling of temporary relief. He knows well, though, that the relief is only temporary. Moreover in his heart he foresees a still more inescapable hopelessness, which, by its very nature, will give a more permanent feeling of relief.”

— Yukio Mishima

194. “And at the time it had not been the flames against which they fought, but against human relationships, against loves and hatreds, against reason, against property. At the time, like the crew of a wrecked ship, they had found themselves in a situation where it was permissible to kill one person in order that another might live.”

— Yukio Mishima

195. “I dream of a moment when, without my asking, my actions will betray completely this part of me that asks for nothing.”

— Yukio Mishima