Quotes By Simone Weil

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 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.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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.

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

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

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.

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.

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

I can, therefore I am.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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

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

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

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

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.

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.