Yukio Mishima Quotes Page 2

“Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything.

A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.”

“The perfectly ordinary girl and the great philosopher are alike: for both, the smallest triviality can become the vision that wipes out the world.”

“To have to live was blacker than the most joyless kind of blackness, to have to see every day a man who sought to understand the deepest thing within him, and succeeded in it.”

“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.”

“Living is merely the chaos of existence.”

“Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.”

“Real danger is nothing more than just living. Of course, living is merely the chaos of existence, but more than that it's a crazy mixed-up business of dismantling existence instant by instant to the point where the original chaos is restored, and taking strength from the uncertainty and the fear that chaos brings to re-create existence instant by instant.

You won't find another job as dangerous as that. There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”

“Still immersed in his dream, he drank down the tepid tea. It tasted bitter. Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.”

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

“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.”

“Falling in love is a special privilege given to someone whose outward appearance, sensual charm, inner ignorance, disorganization, and lack of awareness allow him to form a kind of imaginary image of others.”

“Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result.”

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

“If the world changed, i could not exist, and if I changed, the world could not exist.”

“Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.”

“The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.”

“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When people concentrate on the idea of beauty, they are, without realizing it, confronted with the darkest thoughts that exist in this world. That, I suppose, is how human beings are made.”

“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.”

“Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”

“The highest point at which human life and art meet is in the ordinary. To look down on the ordinary is to despise what you can't have.

Show me a man who fears being ordinary, and I'll show you a man who is not yet a man.”

“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.”

“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.”

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