Quote

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

Yukio Mishima

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Decay
Purity
Kinds
Kind
World
Decadent
Malignant

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

Image
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
Image
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.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
Yukio Mishima
Image
True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Yukio Mishima
Image
The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
Yukio Mishima
Image
A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.
Yukio Mishima
Image
The mind, by its very nature, persistently tries to live forever, resisting age and attempting to give itself a form... . When a person passes his prime and his life begins to lose true vigor and charm, his mind starts functioning as if it were another form of life it imitates what life does, eventually doing what life cannot do.
Yukio Mishima
Image
According to Eshin's Essentials of Salvation, the Ten Pleasures are but a drop in the ocean when compared to the joys of the Pure Land.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Men had been living a proud life, having felt no need for the spirit-until Christianity invented it.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
Image
..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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
Yukio Mishima
Image
if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist
Yukio Mishima