Wisdom of Kimitake Hiraoka

Kimitake Hiraoka (平岡 公威 January 14th, 1925 – November 25th, 1970), known by his pen name Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫), was a Japanese author, playwright, actor, poet, model, Shintoist, and the leader of an attempted coup d'état that culminated in his ritual suicide.

Below we list some words of wisdom from Kimitake Hiraoka.

"Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood."

"As long as you know I am waiting, take your time flowers of the spring."

"True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys."

"Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart."

"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."

"Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result"

"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."

"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."

"The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail."

"The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future."

"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."

"To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this."

"Better to be caught in sudden, complete catastrophe than to be gnawed by the cancer of imagination."

"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."

"Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles."

"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."

"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."

"Pain, I came to feel, might well prove to be the sole proof of the persistence of consciousness within the flesh, the sole physical expression of consciousness. As my body acquired muscle, and in turn strength, there was gradually born within me a tendency towards the positive acceptance of pain, and my interest in physical suffering deepened."

"For an artist to do creative work, he needs at once physical health and some physiomental ill health. He needs both serenity and gloom."

"if the world changed, i could not exist, and if i changed, the world could not exist"

"There is no virtue in curiosity. In fact, it might be the most immoral desire a man can possess."

"We tend to suffer from the illusion that we are capable of dying for a belief or theory. What Hagakure is insisting is that even in merciless death, a futile death that knows neither flower nor fruit has dignity as the death of a human being. 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."

"When silence is prolonged over a certain period of time, it takes on new meaning."

"Beauty is something that burns the hand when you touch it."

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