Simone Weil Quotes

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not. ~ Simone Weil

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love. ~ Simone Weil

I was trying to discover examples of a living restoration, trying to go beyond discussions about correct historic colors, materials, and techniques.
I looked to the past for guidance, to find the graces we need to save. I want to be an importer. This is not nostalgia; I am not nostalgic. I am not looking for a way back. "From where will a renewal come to us, to us who have devastated the whole earthly globe?" asked Simone Weil. "Only from the past if we love it."
What I am looking for is the trick of having the same ax twice, for a restoration that renews the spirit, for work that transforms the worker. We may talk of saving antique linens, species, or languages; but whatever we are intent on saving, when a restoration succeeds, we rescue ourselves.
Howard Mansfield, The Same Ax Twice: Restoration and Renewal in a Throwaway Age ~ Howard Mansfield

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil. ~ Simone Weil

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege. ~ Simone Weil

If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device. ~ 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

Simone Weil was absolutely right- beauty and affliction are the only two things that can pierce our hearts. Because this is so true, we must have a measure of beauty in our lives proportionate to our affliction. No more. Much more. Is this not God's prescription for us? Just take a look around. ~ John Eldredge

Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. ~ Simone Weil

Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back. ~ Simone Weil

When someone joins a party, it is usually because he has perceived, in the activities and propaganda of this party, a number of things that appeared to him just and good. Still, he has probably never studied the position of the party on all the problems of public life. When joining the party, he therefore also endorses a number of positions which he does not know. In fact, he submits his thinking to the authority of the party. As, later on, little by little, he begins to learn these positions, he will accept them without further examination. This ~ Simone Weil

All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved. ~ Simone Weil

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. ~ Simone Weil

The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be. ~ Simone Weil

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower. ~ Simone Weil

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts? ~ Simone Weil

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. ~ Simone Weil

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false? ~ Simone Weil

The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measure, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. We can know men to a certain extent if at the same time as we observe them from the outside we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying...This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, whereas, on the contrary, we must have given all our attention, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. ~ Simone Weil

We should not seize upon these mysteries as truths, for that is impossible, but recognize the subordination to these mysteries which we love of all that we seize upon as truths. The intelligence can recognize this subordination by feeling that the love of these mysteries is the source of conceptions which it can seize upon as truths. Such should be the relationship between faith and love. ~ Simone Weil

Christ himself came down and took possession of me ... I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God ... in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love. ~ Simone Weil

Power ... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood. ~ Simone Weil

Nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature. ~ Simone Weil

Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist. ~ Simone Weil

The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve. ~ Simone Weil

The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories. ~ Simone Weil

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is. ~ Simone Weil

If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water. ~ Simone Weil

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

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her. ~ Simone Weil

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. ~ Simone Weil

In general the relative value of the various religions is a very difficult thing to discern; it is almost impossible, perhaps quite impossible. For a religion is known only from inside. ~ Simone Weil

Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy.
Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so ~ Simone Weil

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him. ~ Simone Weil

Love is not consolation. It is light. ~ Simone Weil

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil

There are two forms of friendship: meeting and separation. They are indissoluble. Both of them contain some good, and this good of friendship is unique, 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. As both forms contain the same good thing, they are both equally good. ~ Simone Weil

The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of out lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some men, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religions because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surroundings impregnated with a spirit of this sort. We must conclude that in such cases, by God's mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the world, if they are sufficiently strong and pure, will be enough to raise the soul to any height. ~ Simone Weil

All sins are attempts to fill voids. ~ Simone Weil

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality. ~ Simone Weil

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. ~ Simone Weil

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul. ~ Simone Weil

Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness. ~ Simone Weil

Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself. ~ Simone Weil

It is to the prodigals ... that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning. ~ Simone Weil

Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built. ~ Simone Weil

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists throughout the world with a general idea of the history and development of their particular science: there is none who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work ... ~ Simone Weil

If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, man cannot but succumb to it. ~ Simone Weil

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. ~ Simone Weil

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate ... ~ Simone Weil

To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal. ~ Simone Weil

The Gospels: God's perfection consists in non-intervention. ~ Simone Weil

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death. ~ Simone Weil

When a country has political parties, sooner or later it becomes impossible to intervene effectively in public affairs without joining a party and playing the game. Whoever is concerned for public affairs will wish his concern to bear fruit. Those who care about the public interest must either forget their concern and turn to other things, or submit to the grind of the parties. In the latter case, they shall experience worries that will soon supersede their original concern for the public interest. ~ Simone Weil

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention. ~ Simone Weil

Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity. ~ Simone Weil

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. ~ Simone Weil

The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It too is something like a sacrament. ~ Simone Weil

God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone. ~ Simone Weil

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality . . . and by the sharpness of their insights. . . . But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn to an equally exaggerated aversion. Of all such writers, one might say that one cannot imagine them as children. The more we read them, the more we become aware that something has gone badly wrong with their affective life; . . . it is not only impossible to imagine one of them as a happy husband or wife, it is impossible to imagine their having a single intimate friend to whom they could open their hearts. ~ W. H. Auden

The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merly turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening. ~ Simone Weil

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication. ~ Simone Weil

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. ~ Simone Weil

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being ... ~ Simone Weil

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. ... Every separation is a link. ~ Simone Weil

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion
for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent
took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups ~ Simone Weil

Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end. ~ Simone Weil

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

Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear there is nothing in it to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention. ~ Simone Weil

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization. ~ Simone Weil

All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight
the prejudice that everything sexual is vile. ~ Simone Weil

Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image. ~ Simone Weil

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise. ~ Simone Weil

Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it. ~ Simone Weil

Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention. ~ Simone Weil

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction. ~ Simone Weil

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action. ~ Simone Weil

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. ~ Simone Weil

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'. ~ Simone Weil

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit. ~ Simone Weil

When we see the world, the image we see is not only a reflection of the world, it is also a reflection of us. ~ Simone Weil

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence. ~ Simone Weil

I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose. ~ Simone Weil

There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works. ~ Simone Weil

We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Laical education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up those treasures, and those of Christianity as well. ~ Simone Weil

If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience. ~ Simone Weil

A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again ~ Simone Weil

Education
whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself
consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good
that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution. ~ Simone Weil

If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures. ~ Simone Weil

The Cross of Christ is the only gateway to knowledge. ~ Simone Weil

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge. ~ Simone Weil

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. ~ Simone Weil