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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.

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
Human
Meet
Humans
Ordinary
Looks
Highest
Men
Point
Life
Show
Art
Shows
Despise
Look
Fears

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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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
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Was I ignorant, then, when I was seventeen? I think not. I knew everything. A quarter-century's experience of life since then has added nothing to what I knew. The one difference is that at seventeen I had no 'realism'.
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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For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
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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Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
Yukio Mishima
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The most appropriate type of daily life for me was a day-by-day world destruction peace was the most difficult and abnormal state to live in.
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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Within those confining walls, teachers - a bunch of men all armed with the same information - gave the same lectures every year from the same notebooks and every year at the same point in the textbooks made the same jokes.
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.
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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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
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If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death No death may be called futile.
Yukio Mishima
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If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.
Yukio Mishima
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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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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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The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.
Yukio Mishima
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Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
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The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.
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