Quote

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

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
Hand
Hands
Life
Clearly
Eternity
Touch
Impossible

More quotes by Yukio Mishima

Image
Quite possibly, what I call happiness may coincide with what others call the moment of imminent danger
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
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
Possessing by letting go of things was a secret of ownership unknown to youth.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
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
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.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.
Yukio Mishima
Image
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
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
Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination.
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
Image
It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.
Yukio Mishima
Image
There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.
Yukio Mishima
Image
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
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
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.
Yukio Mishima
Image
His emotion evident in the glitter of his eyes.
Yukio Mishima