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

— Yukio Mishima Runaway Horses (1969)

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Poetry

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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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

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.