Quotes By Simone Weil

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.

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.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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

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.

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.

I can, therefore I am.

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 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.

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

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

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.