Yukio Mishima Quotes

1925–1970 Japan

Yukio Mishima (January 14, 1925 – November 25, 1970) was the pen name of Kimitake Hiraoka, a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, film director, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai.

Japan
Activists
Actors
Essayists
Film directors

Also known as: Mishima, Yukio, Hiraoka Kimitake, Sun and Steel

Random Yukio Mishima quote

25 quotes

My "act" has ended by becoming an integral part of my nature, I told myself. It's no longer an act.

Confessions of a Mask (1949)

Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain.

Sun and Steel (1968)

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words will be corroded too.

Sun and Steel (1968)

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.

Is there not one person among you who will rise with me now?

There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Confessions of a Mask (1949)

Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.

Confessions of a Mask (1949)

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.

Sun and Steel (1968)

All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence.

Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

I want to make a poem of my life.

Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of death.

Runaway Horses (1969)

He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.

If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death? No death may be called futile.

Yukio Mishima on Hagakure : The Samurai Ethic and Modern Japan (1977)

As he saw it, there was only one choice — to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.

I had no taste for defeat — much less victory — without a fight.

Sun and Steel (1968)

In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.

Sun and Steel (1968)

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

Confessions of a Mask (1949)

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.

Confessions of a Mask (1949)

Human beings — they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?

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.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Yukio Mishima (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.