Yukio Mishima
Author
1925-01-14
Quotes by Yukio Mishima
-
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. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
Read quote -
Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
Read quote -
They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.
Read quote -
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Read quote -
For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.
Read quote -
The blossoms seem unusually lovely this year. There were none of the scarlet-and-white-striped curtains that are set up among the blossoming trees so invariably that one has to come to think of them as the attire of cherry blossoms; there were no bustling tea-stalls, no holiday crowds of flower-viewers, no one hawking balloons and toy windmills; instead there were only the cherry trees blossoming undisturbed among the evergreens, making one feel as though he were seeing the naked bodies of the blossoms. Nature's free bounty and useless extravagance had never appeared so fantastically beautiful as it did this spring. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that Nature had come to reconquer the earth for herself.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Read quote -
Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.
Read quote -
A feeling of liberation should contain a bracing feeling of negation, in which liberation itself is not negated. In the moment a captive lion steps out of his cage, he possesses a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds to 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. Etsuko however, had in her heart not the slightest interest in these matters. Her soul knew nothing but affirmation.
Read quote -
So young and so lethargic! As though he had been born to sit and stare like this. Ever since Kiyoaki had confided in him, Shigekuni, who would have been bright and confident, as befitted such an able young man, had undergone a change. Or rather, the friendship between him and Kiyoaki had undergone a strange reversal. For years, each of them had been extremely careful to intrude in no way on the personal life of the other. But now, just three days before, Kiyoaki had suddenly come to him and, like a newly cured patient transmitting his disease to someone else, had passed on to his friend the virus of introspection. It had taken hold so readily that Honda's disposition now seemed a far better host to it than Kiyoaki's. The first major symptom of the disease was a vague sense of apprehension.
Read quote -
The Imperial Concubine was fully aware of her own beauty, and she tended to be attracted by any force, such as religion, that treated her beauty and her high rank as things of no value.
Read quote -
The only real flesh was the flesh that existed in his imagination. Since, therefore, he regarded the flesh as an ideal abstraction, rather than as a physical fact, he had relied on his spiritual strength to subjugate it.
Read quote -
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. Full of the glitter and the frenzy of night, the horn thundered in, conveying from the distant offing, from the dead center of the sea, a thirst for the dark nectar in the little room.
Read quote -
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.
Read quote -
True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Read quote -
Amid the moon and the stars, amid the clouds of the night, amid the hills which bordered on the sky with their magnificent silhouette of pointed cedars, amid the speckled patches of the moon, amid the temple buildings that emerged sparkling white out of the surrounding darkness - amid all this, I was intoxicated by the pellucid beauty of Uiko's treachery.
Read quote -
For everything sacred has the substance of dreams and memories, and so we experience the miracle of what is separated from us by time or distance suddenly being made tangible.
Read quote -
Thus in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.
Read quote -
Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.
Read quote