Yukio Mishima Quotes

70 Sourced 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.

Yukio Mishima
There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.

Yukio Mishima
Within those confining walls, teachers — a bunch of men all armed with the same information — gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.

Yukio Mishima
I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.

Yukio Mishima
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result

Yukio Mishima
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.

Yukio Mishima
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.

Yukio Mishima
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one's own heart.

Yukio Mishima
The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

Yukio Mishima
We are not wounded so deeply when betrayed by the things we hope for as when betrayed by things we try our best to despise. In such betrayal comes the dagger in the back.

Yukio Mishima