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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
Machines
Cogs
Function
Samurai
Skills
Absorbed
Completely
Technical
Human
Whereas
Humans
Skill
Men
Machine
Total
Degenerated

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed.
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When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
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Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
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He had never looked forward to the wisdom and other vaunted benefits of old age. Would he be able to die young—and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death—as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.
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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.
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Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.
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His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.
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For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
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We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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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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All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression.
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Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Yukio Mishima
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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
Yukio Mishima
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Beyond doubt, there was a certain splendor in pain, which bore a deep affinity to the splendor that lies hidden within strength.
Yukio Mishima
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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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Abruptly he thrust his snow-drenched leather gloves against my cheeks. I dodged. A raw carnal feeling blazed up within me, branding my cheeks. I felt myself staring at him with crystal clear eyes... From that time on I was in love with Omi.
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A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.
Yukio Mishima
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Let us remember that the central reality must be sought in the writer's work: it is what the writer chose to write, or was compelled to write, that finally matters. And certainly Mishima's carefully premeditated death is part of his work.
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..and certain that life consisted of a few simple signals and decisions that death took root at the moment of birth and man’s only recourse thereafter was to water and tend it that propagation was a fiction consequently, society was a fiction too that fathers and teachers, by virtue of being fathers and teachers, were guilty of a grievous sin.
Yukio Mishima
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Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
Yukio Mishima