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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the struggle of an artist to express complex emotions and ideas effectively.
Yukio Mishima articulates the profound inner conflict he faced throughout his life regarding his existence and the limitations of language. His journey through writing reveals a deep awareness that words alone cannot fully encapsulate human experience, prompting him to seek alternative forms of artistic expression beyond traditional storytelling.
In practice
In a discussion about the limitations of language in art.
What I wanted was to die among strangers, untroubled, beneath a cloudless sky. And yet my desire differed from the sentiments of that ancient Greek who wanted to die under the brilliant sun. What I wanted was some natural, spontaneous suicide. I wanted a death like that of a fox, not yet well versed in cunning, that walks carelessly along a mountain path and is shot by a hunter because of its own stupidity.
a samurai is a total human being, whereas a man who is completely absorbed in his technical skill has degenerated into a ‘function’, one cog in a machine.
When a captive lion steps out of his cage, he comes into a wider world than the lion who has known only the wilds. While he was in captivity, there were only two worlds for him - the world of the cage, and the world outside the cage. Now he is free. He roars. He attacks people. He eats them. Yet he is not satisfied, for there is no third world that is neither the world of the cage nor the world outside the cage.
…the samurai ethic is a political science of the heart, designed to control such discouragement and fatigue in order to avoid showing them to others. It was thought more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to seem bold and daring than to be so. This view of morality, since it is physiologically based on the special vanity peculiar to men, is perhaps the supreme male view of morality.
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.
Is there not a sort of remorse that precedes sin? Was it remorse at the very fact that I existed?
In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.
Beauty is perfect in its imperfections, so you just have to go with the imperfections.
Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
Inscribe all human effort with one word, artistry's haunting curse, the Incomplete!
Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.