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

Yukio Mishima Quotes

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

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

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

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

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima
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