Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart. Yukio Mishima More Quotes by Yukio Mishima More Quotes From Yukio Mishima Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result Yukio Mishima standpoint results 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. Yukio Mishima humble spring beautiful If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss. Yukio Mishima dark loss clouds 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. Yukio Mishima world-destruction abnormal daily-life …the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality. Yukio Mishima vanity heart men Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music. Yukio Mishima strange player perfect I want to make a poem of my life. Yukio Mishima want I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight. Yukio Mishima victory fighting taste Even when we're with someone we love, we're foolish enough to think of her body and soul as being separate. To stand before the person we love is not the same as loving her true self, for we are only apt to regard her physical beauty as the indispensable mode of her existence. When time and space intervene, it is possible to be deceived by both, but on the other hand, it is equally possible to draw twice as close to her real self. Yukio Mishima real love-is thinking Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it. Yukio Mishima proud men needs 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. Yukio Mishima cogs skills men Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff. Yukio Mishima bitter glory stuff An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn’t tiny or giant enough to defeat anything. Yukio Mishima giants shadow men When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage. Yukio Mishima captivity two people if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist Yukio Mishima changed ifs world I am one who has always been interested only in the edges of the body and the spirit, the outlying regions of the body and the outlying regions of the spirit. The depths hold no interest for me; I leave them to others, for they are shallow, commonplace. What is there, then, at the outer most edge? Nothing, perhaps, save a few ribbons, dangling down into the void. Yukio Mishima ribbons depth body Suddenly the full long wail of a ship's horn surged through the open window and flooded the dim room—a cry of boundless, dark, demanding grief; pitch-black and glabrous as a whale's back and burdened with all the passions of the tides, the memory of voyages beyond counting, the joys, the humiliations: the sea was screaming. Yukio Mishima passion grief memories The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids. Yukio Mishima blades flesh sun Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth. Yukio Mishima youth secret letting-go However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality. Yukio Mishima individuality men art
