Quotes By Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Simone Weil
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Simone Weil
It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.
Simone Weil
I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.
Simone Weil
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
Simone Weil
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
Simone Weil
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
Simone Weil
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.
Simone Weil
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
Simone Weil
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
Simone Weil
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil