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‘The human body is the work of art. It doesn’t need artists.’ But the artist replies: ‘Okay, let’s say you’re right. What good does your sweating and grunting do. Even the most beautiful body is destroyed by age. Where is beauty then? Only art makes human beauty endure. You must devise an artist’s scheme to preserve it. You must commit suicide at the height of your beauty.’

— Yukio Mishima Kyoko's House (1959)

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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?

All Yukio Mishima quotes →

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.