Quotes By Simone Weil

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.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

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.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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

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.

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

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

Humility is attentive patience.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

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

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

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.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

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.

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.