Mishima Yukio: Zitate auf Englisch
“There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess.”
Quelle: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 222.
Quelle: Runaway Horses
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/06/02/books/book-reviews/yukio-mishimas-demons-full-force-runaway-horses/ note: Runaway Horses (1969)
“Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”
Quelle: Thirst for Love
“When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning.”
Quelle: Thirst for Love
“if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist”
Quelle: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).
Kontext: What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.
Quelle: Sun and Steel (1968), p. 87.
Kontext: Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of the group was also necessary, the quality that constantly raised the group out of the abandon and torpor into which it was prone to lapse, leading it to an ever-mounting shared suffering and so to death, which was the ultimate suffering. The group must be open to death — which meant, of course, that it must be a community of warriors.
"The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love" in Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories (1966), p. 61.
Kontext: 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 the Truth. And first we must know that each of the petals has eighty-four thousand veins and that each vein gives eighty-four thousand lights.
“Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it.”
Quelle: Forbidden Colors
“The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.”
Quelle: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
“… living is merely the chaos of existence…”
Quelle: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“… of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.”
Quelle: Confessions of a Mask
“There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.”
Quelle: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
“He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes.”
Quelle: Spring Snow
“For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.”
Quelle: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Addressing the SPF Garrison at Ichigaya Camp during his failed coup attempt, as quoted at "Yukio Mishima" by Kerry Bolton at Counter Currents Publishing http://www.counter-currents.com/2011/01/yukio-mishima-2/; upon going back inside he is said to have commented to his followers: "I don't think they even heard me".
Final address (1970)
“I want to make a poem of my life.”
As quoted by Mishima's biographer, Henry Scott-Stokes in the documentary Yukio Mishima : Samurai Writer (1985)
Quelle: Confessions of a Mask (1949), p. 118.
Kontext: 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.
“All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence.”
As quoted in Mishima : A Life in Four Chapters (1985).
Kontext: 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.
