Yukio Mishima Quotes
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Japanese people today think of money, just money: Where is our national spirit today? The Jieitai must be the soul of Japan. … The nation has no spiritual foundation. That is why you don’t agree with me. You will just be American mercenaries. There you are in your tiny world. You do nothing for Japan. … I salute the Emperor. Long live the emperor!
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I received an impassioned letter from Sonoko. There was no doubt that she was truly in love. I felt jealous. Mine was the unbearable jealousy a cultured pearl must feel toward a genuine one. Or can there be such a thing in this world as a man who is jealous of the woman who loves him, precisely because of her love?
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Actually the action called a kiss represented nothing more for me than some place where my spirit could seek shelter.
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I want to make a poem of my life.
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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?
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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.
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Held in the custody of childhood is a locked chest; the adolescent, by one means or another, tries to open it. The chest is opened: inside, there is nothing. So he reaches a conclusion: the treasure chest is always like this, empty. From this point on, he gives priority to this assumption of his rather than to reality. In other words, he is now a 'grown-up.'
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He'd been mistaken in thinking that if he killed himself the sordid bourgeois world would perish with him.
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Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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As he saw it, there was only one choice - to be strong and upright, or to commit suicide.
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I had no taste for defeat - much less victory - without a fight.
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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.
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In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away - of their corrosive function - just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.
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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.