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

More quotes by 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.
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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
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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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There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
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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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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
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By means of microscopic observation and astronomical projection the lotus flower can become the foundation for an entire theory of the universe and an agent whereby we may perceive Truth.
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The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.
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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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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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A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
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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Human beings - they go on being born and dying, dying and being born. It's kind of boring, isn't it?
Yukio Mishima
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
Yukio Mishima
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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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There's a huge seal called 'impossibility' pasted all over this world. And don't ever forget that we're the only ones who can tear it off once and for all.
Yukio Mishima
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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
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We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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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When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.
Yukio Mishima