War and the Iliad Quotes

“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“Force is that which makes a thing of whoever submits to it. Exercised to the extreme, it makes the human being a thing quite literally, that is, a dead body. Someone was there and, the next moment, no one. The Iliad never tires of presenting us this tableau [...]

The force that kills is summary and crude. How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet. It will kill for a certainty, or it will kill perhaps, or it may merely hang over the being it can kill at any instant; in all cases, it changes the human being into stone. From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more momentous, that of making a still living human being into a thing. He is living, he has a soul; he is nonetheless a thing. Strange being—a thing with a soul; strange situation for the soul! Who can say how it must each moment conform itself, twist and contort itself? It was not created to inhabit a thing; when it compels itself to do so, it endures violence through and through.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“From its first property (the ability to turn a human being into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human being into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet - he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this - a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved sorrowfully because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“Where history showed us only ramparts and frontiers, poetry discovered a mysterious predestination that makes two adversaries, whose meeting is inexorable, worthy of each other. And Homer asks no quarter, save from poetry, which repossesses beauty from death and wrests from it the secret of justice that history cannot fathom. To the darkened world poetry alone restores pride, eclipsed by the arrogance of the victors and the silence of the vanquished.”
― Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad

“Such is the power of might. Its power to transform an into a thing double and it cuts both ways; it petrifies differently but equally the souls of those who suffer it, and of those who wield it.”
― Simone Weil, The Iliad, or The Poem of Force

“The idea of a person's being a thing ... constantly aspiring to be ... and never achieving it--here, surely, is death but death spread out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad

“La noción se hizo familiar en todos los lugares donde penetró el helenismo. Esta noción griega es quizá la que subsiste, con el nombre de kharma, en los países orientales impregnados de budismo; pero Occidente la ha perdido y ya ni siquiera tiene en sus lenguas palabras para expresarla; las ideas de limite, de mesura, de equilibrio, que deberían determinar la conducta de la vida, sólo tienen un empleo servil en la técnica. No somos geómetras más que ante la materia; los griegos fueron primero geómetras en el aprendizaje de la virtud.”
― Simone Weil, War and the Iliad