Awaiting God Quotes

“Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“In the preparatory period the soul loves in the void. It does not know if something real answers to its love. It can believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows in a certain way only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it cries out its hunger. A child does not cease crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It cries even then. The danger is not that the soul might doubt whether or not there is bread, but that it could be persuaded through a lie that it is not hungry. It can only be persuaded of this by a lie, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief; it is a certainty.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The whole world knows there is only truly intimate conversation between two or three. As soon as there are five or six, the collective language begins to dominate. That is why, when one applies the words to the Church, ‘Anywhere two or three are gathered in my name, I will be in their midst,’ one is committing a complete contradiction. Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty or ten. He says two or three. He says precisely that he is always the third in intimate Christian friendship, in face-to-face intimacy.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“To conceive God as an all-powerful Person, or else, under the name of Christ, as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. For this reason we must love the perfection of the heavenly Father even in the diffusion of sunlight. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation in us—which is obedience—is the creative and ordained principle of the universe, such is the fullness of being.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“It is so easy to stay within one’s group, especially for Catholics, cutting ourselves off from our Orthodox brothers, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, believers or non-believers in other religions. But I have to tell you that in the light of the Gospel and Catholic principle, this logic of division makes no sense. Jesus came to break down the barriers; he died to proclaim universal brotherhood; the central point of his teaching is charity – that is, the love that binds all human beings to him as the elder brother and binds us all with him to the Father.1”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The beauty of the world is the mouth of the labyrinth. Having entered, the unwary ones take a few steps and in a little while are unable to find the opening again. Exhausted, without anything to eat or to drink, in the dark, separated from kin, from everything they love, from everything they know, they walk without any knowledge, any experience, incapable of even discovering whether they are truly walking or just turning around in one place. But this affliction is nothing compared to the danger that menaces them. For if they do not lose courage, they will continue walking, and it is completely certain that they will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting to eat them! Later they will emerge, changed. Having been eaten and digested by God they become ‘other.’ After that they will be held at the opening of the labyrinth, gently pushing in others who approach.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“To claim either that only Christian miracles are authentic and all the others false, or that they alone are caused by God and all the rest by demons, is a miserable expedient. For it is an arbitrary claim, and hence, the miracles prove nothing. They themselves need to be proven since they receive a stamp of authenticity from the outside.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“Through my suffering I only felt the presence of a love analogous to that which one reads in the smile of a beloved face.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice excuses those who possess [wealth] from giving. If they give all the same, they believe they can be content in themselves. They believe they have done a good work. As for those who receive, whether they are excused from all gratitude or compelled to offer lowly thanks depends on how they understand this notion. Only the absolute identification of justice and love renders possible both compassion and gratitude on one hand, and on the other, respect for the dignity of affliction in the afflicted, for themselves and for others.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“Creation is, on God’s part, not an act of self-expansion, but a retreat, a renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminishment. God emptied Himself of part of His being. God emptied Himself in the act of His divinity. This is why St. John says, ‘The Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world.’ God permitted things to exist other than Himself and worth infinitely less than Himself. By the act of creation, God denied himself, just as Christ told us to deny ourselves. God denied Himself in our favour to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for Him. This response, this echo, subject to our refusal, is the only possible justification for the folly of love in the act of creation. Religions with this conception of renunciation, this voluntary distance, this voluntary effacement of God, His apparent absence and His secret presence here below … these religions are the true religion, translations of the Great Revelation into different languages. Religions that represent divinity as commanding wherever it has the power to do so are false. Even if they are monotheistic, they are idolatries.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The true God is the God we conceive as all-powerful, but Who nevertheless does not command it where He has the power, for God is found only in the heavens or here below in secret.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“When a soul achieves a love that fills the whole universe equally, this love must become the chick with golden wings that pierces the egg of the world. After this it loves the universe not from the inside, but from the outside, from the place where our firstborn brother, the Wisdom of God, is seated.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The attitude that brings about salvation does not resemble any human activity. The Greek word that expresses this is ὑπομονή, which patientia translated quite poorly. It is expectant waiting (attente), attentive immobility and fidelity that lasts indefinitely and can never be shaken by any shock. The slave that listens before the door to open it when the master knocks is the best image of it. He must be ready to die of hunger and exhaustion rather than changing his attitude. It must be possible for his comrades to call him, speak to him and hit him without causing him to even turn his head. Even if someone told him that the master was dead—and even if he believed it—he would not budge. If someone told him the master was irritated with him and would beat him on his return—and if he believed it—he would not budge.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“the exchange of love is illegitimate if one or the other’s consent does not proceed from the central point of the soul where the ‘yes’ can only be eternal. The obligation of marriage, which is now so often regarded as a simple social convention, is written into the very nature of human thought by the affinity between carnal love and beauty. Everything that has some relationship to beauty should be exempted (unaffected) by the passage of time. Beauty is eternity here below.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“the current conception according to which God arbitrarily sends more grace to one, less to another, like a capricious sovereign—under the pretext that God does not owe it to anyone! God owes it to His own infinite goodness to grant to each creature an abundance of goodness. Rather, we ought to think that God is continually spreading the abundance of grace on everyone, but we consent to it more or less. In purely spiritual matters, God hears (grants) all desires. Those that have less ask for less.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The mysteries of the faith are not an object for the intelligence as the faculty which permits affirmation or denial. They are not of the order of the truth, but above it. The only part of the human soul capable of real contact with them is the faculty of supernatural love. Therefore, it alone is capable of adherence to them.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The scientific conception of the world, properly understood, must not be separated from the true faith. God created this universe as a fabric of secondary causes. It seems impious to suppose there are holes in this fabric, as if God could not achieve His ends without violating His own work. If we admit such holes, it would be a scandal that God does not make some more holes in order to save the innocent from affliction. Resignation to the affliction of innocents cannot arise in the soul except by the contemplation and acceptance of necessity, which is the rigorous sequence (chain) of secondary causes. Otherwise we would be forced to take recourse to artifices (tricks) that all essentially negate (deny) the very fact of the affliction of the innocent, and therefore distort all intelligence of the human condition and even the core of the Christian conception.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“Even the notion of ‘miracle’ is Western and modern; it is connected to the scientific conception of the world, with which it is nevertheless incompatible. What we regard as miracles, the Hindus see as natural effects of exceptional powers that are found in a few people, and more often in the saints. They thus constitute a presumption of saintliness.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“The zeal of missionaries has not Christianized Africa, Asia and Oceana, but has brought these territories under the cold, cruel and destructive domination of the white race, which crushes everything. It would be strange that the word of Christ produced such effects if it had been properly understood.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“When Christ said, ‘Teach all nations and bring them the News (Gospel),’ he ordained them to bring news, not a theology. Christ himself, having come, tells them to add this news to the religion of Israel.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“What we love is perfect joy itself. When we know this, even hope becomes useless; it no longer makes sense. The only thing that remains to hope for is the grace not to disobey here below. The rest is God’s affair alone and not our concern.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“It is in the affliction itself that the mercy of God shines—in the depths, at the center of our inconsolable grief. If, while persevering in love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot restrain the cry, ‘My God, why have you abandoned me,’—if one remains at this point without ceasing to love, we finish by touching something that is not affliction, that is not joy—that is the central essence, essential, pure, beyond the senses, common to joy and to suffering. It is the very love of God.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“But Christ granted to his beloved friend, and without a doubt all those of his spiritual lineage, to come to him without degradation, defilement or distress, but in joy, purity and uninterrupted sweetness.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“When authentic friends of God, such as Meister Eckhart in my opinion, repeat words they heard in secret amidst the silence during union with God, and are in disagreement with the teachings of the Church, it is simply that the language of the marketplace is not that of the nuptial chamber.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“For it seemed certain, and I believe it still today, that we can never wrestle God too much if we do so out of pure concern for the truth. Christ loves that we prefer the truth to him, because before being the Christ, he is the Truth. If someone takes a detour from him to go towards the truth, they will not go a long way without falling into his arms.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“I can say that in all of my life I have never, at any moment, ‘sought for God.’ Perhaps for that reason, without a doubt too subjective, I do not like that expression and it seems false to me. Since adolescence I have believed that the problem of God is a problem of missing data here below and that the only certain method for avoiding a false solution, which seems to me the greatest harm possible, is not posing it. So I did not pose it. I did not affirm or deny anything. It useless seemed to me to solve the problem, for I think that in this world our business is to adopt the best attitude of solving the problems of this world, and this attitude is not dependent on a solution of the problem of God.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“I hope this surrender, even if I am mistaken, will finally lead me to safe harbor. What I call safe harbor, as you know, is the Cross.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“we are not aware of what is most essentially bad in us.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“There is a transcendent energy whose source is from heaven that flows into us as soon as we desire it. It is the true energy; it executes actions through the mediation of our souls and our bodies. We should ask for this food. The moment we ask for it and even by the fact that we ask, we know that God wants to give it to us.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux

“God is the one who bends over us—we the afflicted ones, reduced to pieces of inert and bleeding flesh. But at the same time God is in some way also the afflicted One who appears to us as an inanimate body in some way—of Whom it seems all thought is absent—the afflicted One we know nothing about, without rank or name. The inanimate body is the created universe. The love we owe to God and would be our supreme perfection if we could reach it is the divine model of both gratitude and compassion.”
― Simone Weil, Awaiting God: A New Translation of Attente de Dieu and Lettre a Un Religieux