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Japan was to be married, not to Hitler, but to the German forests; not to Mussolini, but to the Roman pantheon. It was a pact joining German, Roman, and Japanese mythology: a friendship among the beautiful, masculine, pagan gods of East and West.

— Yukio Mishima The Temple of Dawn (1970)

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Beauty

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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?

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Beautiful objects are wrought by study through effort, but ugly things are reaped automatically without toil.

Democritus Freeman (1948)

True beauty dwells in deep retreats,
Whose veil is unremoved
Till heart with heart in concord beats,
And the lover is beloved.

William Wordsworth

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare The Rape of Lucrece (1594)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Yukio Mishima (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.