Love in the Void Quotes

“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.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“We have a heavenly country, but in a sense it is too difficult to love, because we do not know it; above all, in a sense, it is too easy to love, because we can imagine it as we please. We run the risk of loving a fiction under this name. If the love of the fiction is strong enough it makes all virtues easy, but at the same time of little value. Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love. It is this country that God has given us to love. He has willed that it should be difficult yet possible to love it.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“God is not present, even if we invoke him, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good. They may even be loved on this account, but then they are in their natural role, the role of matter and of things. We have to bring to them in their inert, anonymous condition a personal love....In true love it is not we who love the afflicted in God; it is God in us who loves them.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“A popular Spanish song says in words of marvelous truth: “If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor.” Love sees what is invisible.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“I have never caused anyone to weep. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never made anyone afraid. I have never been deaf to words of justice and truth.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“[God] created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“The virtue of humility is incompatible with the sense of belonging to a social group chosen by God, whether a nation or a church.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist. Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the roadside. The Samaritan who stops and looks gives his attention all the same to this absent humanity, and the actions which follow prove that it is a question of real attention.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“God denied himself for our sakes in order to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response, this echo, which it is in our power to refuse, is the only possible justification for the folly of love of the creative act.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“He who treats as equals those who are far below him in strength really makes them a gift of the quality of human beings, of which fate had deprived them. As far as it is possible for a creature, he reproduces the original generosity of the Creator with regard to them. This is the most Christian of virtues.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. Exactly, in every respect, including the slightest details of accent and attitude, for a detail may be enough to place the weaker party in the condition of matter, which on this occasion naturally belongs to him, just as the slightest shock causes water that has remained liquid below freezing point to solidify.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“The only difference between the person who witnesses an act of justice and the one who receives a material advantage from it is that in such circumstances the beauty of justice is only a spectacle for the first, while for the second it is the object of a contact and even a kind of nourishment. Thus the feeling which is simple admiration in the first should be carried to a far higher degree in the second by the fire of gratitude. To be ungrateful when we have been treated with justice, in circumstances where injustice is easily possible, is to deprive ourselves of the supernatural and sacramental virtue contained in every pure act of justice.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“Our notion of justice dispenses him who possesses from the obligation of giving. If he gives all the same, he thinks he has a right to be pleased with himself. He thinks he has done a good work. As for him who receives, it depends on the way he interprets this notion whether he is exempted from all gratitude or whether it obliges him to offer servile thanks. Only the absolute identification of justice and love makes the coexistence possible of compassion and gratitude on the one hand, and on the other, of respect for the dignity of affliction in the afflicted–a respect felt by the sufferer himself and the others.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“In every kind of human occupation there is always some regard for the beauty of the world seen in more or less distorted or soiled images. As a consequence there is not any department of human life which is purely natural. The supernatural is secretly present throughout. Under a thousand different forms, grace and mortal sin are everywhere.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us