quotes by Simone Weil

"“All sins are attempts to fill voids.” "
— Simone Weil

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."
— Simone Weil

"A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not."
— Simone Weil (Waiting for God)

"Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. "
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
— Simone Weil

"The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell. "
— Simone Weil

"If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire."
— Simone Weil

"Humility is attentive patience.

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— Simone Weil

"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."
— Simone Weil

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know. "
— Simone Weil

"To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity. "
— Simone Weil

"It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. "
— Simone Weil

"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. "
— Simone Weil

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
— Simone Weil

"Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not."
— Simone Weil

"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."
— Simone Weil

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."
— Simone Weil

"Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it."
— Simone Weil

"Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose."
— Simone Weil

"Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it. "
— Simone Weil

"Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity."
— Simone Weil (Lectures on Philosophy)

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."
— Simone Weil

"If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe."
— Simone Weil

"When we hit a nail with a hammer the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into a point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and head of the nail were infinitely big, if would be just the same; the point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of the soul, and social degradation all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time"
— Simone Weil

"One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.

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— Simone Weil

"One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action."
— Simone Weil

"I can, therefore I am."
— Simone Weil

"La beauté séduit la chair pour obtenir la permission de passer jusqu'à l'âme."
— Simone Weil (La Pesanteur et la Grâce)

"Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity."
— Simone Weil

"Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence."
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their time comes, will manufacture professors. "
— Simone Weil

"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."
— Simone Weil

"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. "
— Simone Weil

"Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. "
— Simone Weil

"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."
— Simone Weil

"...the person who is proud of his intelligence is like the prisoner who is proud of his cell."
— Simone Weil

"True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world."
— Simone Weil

"A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless. "
— Simone Weil

""Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.""
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)

"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."
— Simone Weil

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)

"All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass."
— Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)