…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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the samurai's emphasis on outward appearances and the suppression of inner weaknesses.
Yukio Mishima critiques the samurai ethic, highlighting how it prioritizes the projection of strength and health over actual well-being. This perspective suggests that societal expectations can lead individuals to mask their true feelings of discouragement and fatigue, ultimately reflecting a moral framework that values external appearances, particularly in men, over genuine emotional honesty.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about societal expectations of masculinity.
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.
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?
Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result
If power corrupts, the reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims though perhaps in subtler and more tragic ways.
Justice and peace can only thrive together, never apart.
Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things that we do not see.
Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.
She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?
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