Yukio Mishima quotes
a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
What transforms this world is - knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
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.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
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.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. 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.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
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Yukio Mishima quotes
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
His conviction of having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pennant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to him was to live for the emotions--gratuitous and unstable, dying only to quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
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Yukio Mishima quotes
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 Truth.
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