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.
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.
When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.
It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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.
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.
All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
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.
There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
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.
His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
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?
I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.
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.
As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.
The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.
At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.