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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

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Yukio Mishima
Age: 45 †
Born: 1925
Born: January 14
Died: 1970
Died: November 25
Actor
Author
Critic
Essayist
Film Actor
Film Director
Lyricist
Military Personnel
Model
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Screenwriter
City of Tokyo
Mishima Yukio
Kimitake Hiraoka
Hiraoka Kimitake
Skills
Absorbed
Completely
Technical
Human
Whereas
Humans
Skill
Men
Machine
Total
Degenerated
Machines
Cogs
Function
Samurai

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We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.
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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.
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
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At no time are we ever in such complete possession of a journey, down to its last nook and cranny, as when we are busy with preparations for it. After that, there remains only the journey itself, which is nothing but the process through which we lose our ownership of it.
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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
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For a long time I had not approached the forbidden fruit called happiness, but it was now tempting me with a melancholy persistence. I felt as though Sonoko were an abyss above which I stood poised.
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There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
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I want to make a poem of my life.
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Glory, as anyone knows, is bitter stuff.
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I still have no way to survive but to keep writing one line, one more line, one more line.
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The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work.
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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.
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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.
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Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
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I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
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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.
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For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom.
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It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
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It seems to me that before the photograph can exist as art it must, by its very nature choose whether it is to be a record or a testimony.
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