A beautiful death is never within our grasp.
行為の中にしか生はない。
Writers & Literary Figures
Yukio Mishima
Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) was a Japanese novelist, playwright, and nationalist whose extraordinary body of work - including 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion' and the Sea of Fertility tetralogy - earned multiple Nobel Prize nominations. His ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup attempt remains one of the most dramatic deaths in literary history.
View this figure's profile
Yukio Mishima's Other Quotes
There is no such thing as a perfect sentence. Just as there is no such thing as perfect despair.
The beauty of the human body is beautiful precisely because we know it must perish.
The difference between infinity and eternity lies in that one is a matter of quantity, and the other a matter of quality.
Related Quotes
This man might be the one to seize the realm.
-- Kuroda Yoshitaka
Fortune lies in heaven. Armor lies in the heart. Achievement lies in the legs.
-- Uesugi Kenshin
If the cuckoo will not sing, I shall make it want to sing.
-- Toyotomi Hideyoshi
In war, a victory of sixty percent is the best. Total victory breeds complacency.
-- Takeda Shingen
Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy burden. Let thy step be slow and steady, that thou stumble not.
-- Tokugawa Ieyasu
Fifty years of human life -- compared to the realm beneath heaven, it is but a dream, an illusion.
-- Oda Nobunaga