Quotes from Yukio Mishima

For the average man, driven as he is by lurid fantasies, there is almost nothing more deliciously titillating than the contemplation, from a safe distance, of evil laid out in its cause and effect.

Habit is a horrible thing. I repeated the kiss for which I had so repented.

But then another thought occurred to me: if we grant that human passion has the power to rise above all absurdity, how can it be argued that it does not have the power to rise above the absurdities of passion itself?

Perché i tempi sono degenerati fino a questo punto? Perché la gioventù, l'ambizione e la semplicità sono decadute e il mondo è diventato così biasimevole?

Due to my sickliness and the doting care which I had received ever since I was a baby, I had always been too timid even to look people directly in the eye. But now I became obsessed with a single motto —"Be Strong!

The romantic personality is pervaded with a subtle mistrust of intellectualism, and this fact is often conducive to that immoral action called daydreaming. Contrary to belief, daydreaming is not an intellectual process but rather an escape from intellectualism...

In general, things that were endowed with life did not, like the Golden Temple, have the rigid quality of existing once and for all. Human beings were merely allotted one part of nature's various attributes and, by an effective method of substitution, they diffused that part and made it multiply.

There was for me nothing that might have been called the pinnacle of my youth, and so no moment for stopping it. One should stop at the pinnacle. I could discern none. Strangely, I feel no regrets.

I dream of a moment when, without my asking, my actions will betray completely this part of me that asks for nothing

For even in the triviality of a single playing card missing from a deck, the world's order is inevitably turned awry.

Minha consciência não passava de uma ferramenta de distorção, e meu controle, de conjecturas incertas, pura adivinhação. [...] O auto-engano era agora minha última esperança. Um ferido não exige que o curativo improvisado esteja necessariamente limpo

My conscience was pricked by the happiness of being loved. Or perhaps I was craving some still more decisive unhappiness.

What more could I have done when I did not know that to love is both to seek and to be sought? For me love was nothing but a dialogue of little riddles, with no answers given. As for my spirit of adoration, I never even imagined it to be a thing that required some sort of answer.

Beneath the sky, wretched lonliness was no jot better or worse than good fortune and success. To put it another way, wherever you stood, the same starry sky was peering down.

It was a painful awakening. Why were things wrong just as they were? The questions which I had asked myself numberless times since boyhood rose again to my lips. Why are we all burdened with the duty to destroy everything, change everything, entrust everything to impermanency? Is it this unpleasant duty that the world calls life? Or am I the only one for whom it is a duty? At least there was no doubt that I was alone in regarding the duty as a heavy burden.

Simplemente me resultaba doloroso que él pudiera tener interés en tales libros, que revelara su ignorancia, que yo llegara a odiar esa perfección de la que él estaba inconscientemente dotado. Me dolía, en resumen, imaginarme a este pescador aborreciendo su Jonia natal.

His friends were probably right when they called it a pitiful little vacant house. He wondered if that had anything to do with the emptiness of his own world.

to love is both to seek and to be sought

there's the matter of picking the time. There's such a thing as the favorable moment. Determination alone counts for nothing.

it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would seem the ways they would die.

Sá»± ph?n tr?c c?a nàng cÅ©ng gi?ng nhÆ° sá»± ph?n tr?c c?a các vì sao và nh?ng chòm tùng bách nh?n ho?t.

it did gradually and tenaciously arouse within me a sensuous craving for such things as the destiny of soldiers, the tragic nature of their calling, the distant countries they would see, the ways they would die.

La memoria è lo specchio degli inganni

El hecho de que Shinji no experimentara ningún tipo de carencias musicales en en su vida cotidiana se debía sin duda a que el mar satisfacía su necesidad.