The Imperial Concubine was fully aware of her own beauty, and she tended to be attracted by any force, such as religion, that treated her beauty and her high rank as things of no value.

— Yukio Mishima

The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.

— Yukio Mishima

The only people in this world I really trust are my fans - even if they do forget you so fast.

— Yukio Mishima

The only real flesh was the flesh that existed in his imagination. Since, therefore, he regarded the flesh as an ideal abstraction, rather than as a physical fact, he had relied on his spiritual strength to subjugate it.

— Yukio Mishima

The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

— Yukio Mishima

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

— Yukio Mishima

They had laid the tender, down-ruffled little bird on a platter and appeared now to be pondering a way to eat out its heart without causing it distress.

— Yukio Mishima

This time, Lusaka was able to express herself with fluency and candor. The bold letters she had been writing week after week had granted her unexpected new freedom.

— Yukio Mishima

Thus, in a single phrase I can define the great illusion concerning 'love' in this world. It is the effort to join reality with the apparition.

— Yukio Mishima

To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood. Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstay the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing red ball that had been there at first began to whirl, then suddenly dimmed, till it became a cold, bluish-black, flattened disk of iron. He felt he had seen the very essence of the sun.... For a while, wherever he looked he saw the sun's pale afterimage: in the undergrowth; in the shade beneath the trees; even, when he gazed up, in every part of the sky. The truth was something too dazzling to be looked at directly. And yet, once it had come into one's field of vision, one saw patches of light in all kinds of places: the afterimages of virtue.

— Yukio Mishima