Quotes from Yukio Mishima

Again, Saburo Tominaga once went to the Shirakawa Prefectural Office to cash his brother Morikuni's bonus bond and, unwilling to touch paper currency defiled with a foreign-style design, carried it home between chopsticks.

The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.

I was mistaking the fierce, impossible desire of not wanting to be myself for the sexual desire of a man of the world, for the desire that arises from his being himself.

He was a man who had already died once. There was no reason why he should feel any sense of responsibility or attachment to the world. To him, it was nothing more than a sheet of newspaper covered in the scribblings of cockroaches.

I was born with a gloomy nature. I do not think I have ever known what it is to be cheerful and at ease.

At such times I felt as though I was drenched up to my neck in the existence that was myself.

The reluctant masquerade had begun. At about this time I was beginning to understand vaguely the mechanism of the fact that what people regarded as a pose on my part was actually an expression of my need to assert my true nature, and that it was precisely what people regarded as my true self which was a masquerade.

Shunsuké hated the preoccupation with modern psychology that judged his casual, offhand remarks or his daily actions as betraying his identity or ideas with better clarity than did his highly polished sentences.

U mladosti duhovni saputnici su nam prijatelji i knjige. Ali najve?a razlika izme?u prijatelja i knjiga je ta da se prijatelji menjaju, a knjige ne. Knjiga, ?ak i ako skuplja prašinu na polici ili u nekom uglu sobe, uporno ?uva svoj karakter i svoju filozofiju. Prihvataju?i je ili odbacuju?i je, ?itaju?i je ili ne, mi samo možemo da promenimo naš stav prema njoj, i to je sve.

The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

Insomma, esiste pure quel congegno che si chiama il cuore umano, e nessuno sa cos'è che lo fa battere.

Onaj ko uvek nosi samo konfekcijske haljine, uvek je spreman da po?ne da sumnja u postojanje kroja?a.

Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too.

To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous

Man does not live simply in order to die.

Once the world has been transformed into something meaningful, some feel they can die without regret. Others feel that they exist in a world without meaning, so what's the point of living? But where do these two sets of feelings converge? For Hanio, both paths led to the same thing: death.

He was like a husband so jealous that he insists his wife have the very dreams he has.

For ideas are, in the long run, essentially foreign to human existence; and the body — receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control — is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such.

They avoided talk of the old days, like a pair weaving in and out among puddles after a rainstorm, so deftly that neither of them found the process awkward.

Before long, my blood would not permit a halt of even a day or two. Something ceaselessly set me to work; my body could no longer tolerate indolence, but began instantly to thirst for violent action, forever urging me on. Thus for many a day I led a life that others might well dismiss as frenzied obsession.

I discovered how our hearts, as though infected with some malignant virus, were being eaten away by the uneasy awakening that was brazenly intruding upon our dream, by the futile pleasure of our dream seen at the threshold of consciousness.

He was in a room of the Gesshuuji, which he had thought it would be impossible to visit. The approach of death had made the visit easy, had unloosed the weight that held him in the depths of being. It was even a comfort to think, from the light repose the struggle up the hill had brought him, that Kiyoaki, struggling against illness up that same road, had been given wings to soar with by the denial that awaited him.

A dead body reminds me a bit of a bottle of whisky. If you drop the bottle and it cracks, what's inside pours out. It's only natural.

When we plot the happiness of another, we unconsciously impute to the other person what is in another form the dream in which our own happiness is fulfilled. Thus by not thinking of our own happiness we make it possible for ourselves to become egotistic.