True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.
Interpretation
True beauty is intense and deeply transformative, often with powerful consequences.
In this quote, Yukio Mishima suggests that true beauty is not merely superficial or pleasing; it possesses a force that can overwhelm a person. This notion of beauty can evoke strong emotions and lead to profound changes in one's perception and experience, ultimately revealing both its allure and its potentially destructive nature.
In practice
During a lecture on art, an instructor could use this quote to emphasize the complexity of beauty in artistic expression.
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?
As to the pure mind all things are pure, so to the poetic mind all things are poetical.
I read a great deal of science fiction with consummate pleasure between, say, the ages of 12 and 16. Then I got away from it. In my mid- to late 20s, I started trying to write it.
I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.
Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.
I hope I have made it clear that the work is about perfection as we are aware of it in our minds but that the paintings are very far from being perfect - completely removed in fact - even as we ourselves are.
Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise.
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