Simone Weil > Quotes

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― 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

“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

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
― Simone Weil

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. ”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
― Simone Weil

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“Humility is attentive patience.”
― Simone Weil

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached”
― Simone Weil

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”
― Simone Weil

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

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― 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

“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

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”
― 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

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. ”
― Simone Weil

“A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless. ”
― Simone Weil

“I can, therefore I am.”
― 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

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”
― 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

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― 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

“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

“Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.”
― Simone Weil

“The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. ”
― Simone Weil

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
― Simone Weil

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

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

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
― Simone Weil

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
― 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

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”
― Simone Weil

“How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?”
― Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty

“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

“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

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
― Simone Weil

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”
― Simone Weil

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?”
― 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

“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

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil

“To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”
― Simone Weil

“We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.”
― Simone Weil

“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”
― Simone Weil