Quote

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

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

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

Image
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
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
Human life is limited but I would like to live forever.
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
It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
Image
There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.
Yukio Mishima
Image
Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
Yukio Mishima
Image
For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.
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
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
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
Image
if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist
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
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
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
Image
As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
Image
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
Yukio Mishima