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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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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
Truly
Hidden
Baby
Temptation
Simply
Keeping
Animal
Possession
Unadorned
Desire
Innocent
Lusts
Like
Seemed
Tempted
Wings
Wing
Bird
Lust

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

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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.
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Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.
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A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.
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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.
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...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.
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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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A father is a reality-concealing machine, a machine for dishing up lies to kids, and that isn't even the worst of it: secretly he believes that he represents reality.
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It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
Yukio Mishima
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If we look on idly, heaven and earth will never be joined. To join heaven and earth, some decisive deed of purity is necessary. To accomplish so resolute an action, you have to stake your life, giving no thought to personal gain or loss.
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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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I want to make a poem of my life.
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.
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It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
Yukio Mishima
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I cried sobbingly until at last those visions reeking with blood came to comfort me. And then I surrendered myself to them, to those deplorably brutal visions, my most intimate friends.
Yukio Mishima
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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.
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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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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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.
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