Top 200 Yukio Mishima Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “What was there to live for in a time like this? Just living in the present made everyday interminably monotonous.”

— Yukio Mishima

202. “Just as evil never dies, neither does the sentimental.”

— Yukio Mishima

203. “We do not collide with our destiny all of a sudden.”

— Yukio Mishima

204. “What if fleshly entanglements were originally patterned on the erotic union of minds, and merely served as inevitable compensation born from despair?”

— Yukio Mishima

205. “One must merge one form of darkness with another, and then wait for the darkness to be tinged with the rosiness of the fateful dawn to come.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

207. “He hadn’t been able to explain his ideas of glory and death, or the longing and the melancholy pent up in his chest, or the other dark passions choking in the ocean’s swell.”

— Yukio Mishima

208. “Please let the evil that is in my heart increase and multiply indefinitely, so that it may correspond in every particular with that vast light before my eyes! Let the darkness of my heart, in which that evil is enclosed, equal the darkness of the night, which encloses those countless lights!”

— Yukio Mishima

209. “Why was nature so beautiful for no reason at all?”

— Yukio Mishima

210. “Beneath the sky, wretched lonliness was no jot better or worse than good fortune and success. To put it another way, wherever you stood, the same starry sky was peering down.”

— Yukio Mishima

211. “Once the world has been transformed into something meaningful, some feel they can die without regret. Others feel that they exist in a world without meaning, so what’s the point of living? But where do these two sets of feelings converge? For Hanio, both paths led to the same thing: death.”

— Yukio Mishima

212. “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

213. “Habit is a horrible thing. I repeated the kiss for which I had so repented.”

— Yukio Mishima

214. “Then I noticed the pack of cigarettes in my other pocket. I took one out and started smoking. I felt like a man who settles down for a smoke after finishing a job of work. I wanted to live.”

— Yukio Mishima

215. “We are too accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.”

— Yukio Mishima

216. “His was a battlefield without glory, a battlefield where none could display deeds of valour: it was the front line of the spirit.”

— Yukio Mishima

217. “I had long since cut ties with that world, like a yakuza stepping out of the game and washing his hands of it once and for all. I had no more use for dreams. Dreaming was for the moviegoers, fingering their pulpy paper tickets. Not for me.”

— Yukio Mishima

218. “From that moment, death hung over him, snugly, the way snow caps a red postbox after a particularly heavy snowfall.”

— Yukio Mishima

219. “Don’t ask things that don’t concern you. After all, everybody has their own reasons.”

— Yukio Mishima

220. “The odd thing is that only lonely people have a tendency to festoon their abodes with extravagant items.”

— Yukio Mishima

221. “If my self was my dwelling, then my body resembled an orchard that surrounded it. I could either cultivate that orchard to its capacity or leave it for the weeds to run riot in. I was free to choose, but the freedom was not as obvious as it might seem. Many people, indeed, go so far as to refer to the orchards of their dwellings as “destiny.”

— Yukio Mishima

222. “I realized that his death severed the one and only thread that still connected me with the bright world of daylight. It was because of the lost daylight, the lost brightness, the lost summer, that I was crying.”

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

224. “First of all, there was a miserable, despairing woman. Then there was a self-indulgent, heartless husband. And last, a hot-blooded, sympathetic young man. And with that the scenario was complete.”

— Yukio Mishima

225. “Beauty has become a stimulus to garrulity. It has gotten so that on confronting the beautiful one feels duty-bound to say something in a great hurry. It has gotten so we feel we must convert beauty right away. If we don’t convert it, it’s dangerous. Like explosives, beauty has become a difficult thing to own. The power of possessing beauty through silence, this majestic power for which one would lay down his life, has been lost.”

— Yukio Mishima

226. “But it was the kind of experience – like death, like the glow of a jewel, like the beauty of a sunset – that is almost impossible to convey to others.”

— Yukio Mishima

227. “So it is that time reenacts the most curious yet earnest spectacles within the human heart.”

— Yukio Mishima

228. “Maybe the mouse had a misanthropic streak.”

— Yukio Mishima

229. “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

230. “Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was “beyond,” wrong or right, had always been “beyond.” Are you going to give that up?”

— Yukio Mishima

231. “It is no exaggeration to say that the first real problem I faced in my life was that of beauty.”

— Yukio Mishima

232. “Are you going to give up the life which had detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness... Are you going to give up that luminous freedom?”

— Yukio Mishima

233. “The surface of the sea in the lee of the island was black, but the offing was stained with dawn. The mountains enclosing the Gulf of Ise could be seen clearly. In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were.”

— Yukio Mishima

234. “No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. The question of whether he’ll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. Showing up is for second-rate actors who need to seek attention.”

— Yukio Mishima

235. “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. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer.”

— Yukio Mishima

236. “It was a bright, quiet garden, without striking features. Like a rosary rubbed between the hands, the shrilling of cicadas held sway. There was no other sound. The garden was empty. He had come, thought Honda, to a place that had no memories, nothing. The noontide sun of summer flowed over the still garden.”

— Yukio Mishima