Yukio Mishima Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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I had no taste for defeat — much less victory — without a fight.

Yukio Mishima
As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.

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

Yukio Mishima
The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

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

Yukio Mishima
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.

Yukio Mishima
Of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

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

Yukio Mishima
The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.

Yukio Mishima
If the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist

Yukio Mishima
There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

Yukio Mishima
For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

Yukio Mishima
As he saw it, there was only one choice — to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.

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

Yukio Mishima
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?

Yukio Mishima
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.

Yukio Mishima
Human beings — they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?

Yukio Mishima
He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.

Yukio Mishima
It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.

Yukio Mishima
Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.

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
Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.

Yukio Mishima
According to Eshin's "Essentials of Salvation," the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.

Yukio Mishima
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
Advice almost never functions as a social lubricant; eight or nine times out of ten it makes people lose face, crushes their will, and creates a grudge.

Yukio Mishima
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
There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.

Yukio Mishima
From the moment that a man no longer responds in the slightest to the motives that regulate the material world, that world appears to be at complete repose.

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
In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.

Yukio Mishima