Quotes By Simone Weil

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

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 only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

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

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.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.

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.

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

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.