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

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
Yukio Mishima
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There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Yukio Mishima
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The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
Yukio Mishima
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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.
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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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Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.
Yukio Mishima
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I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself.
Yukio Mishima
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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Again and again, the cicada's untiring cry pierced the sultry summer air like a needle at work on thick cotton cloth.
Yukio Mishima
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Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Yukio Mishima
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Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima