Quotes By Simone Weil

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

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

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

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.

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.

I can, therefore I am.

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

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.