Quotes by Weil, Simone

"Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches"

Weil, Simone on adversity   

"The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities."

Weil, Simone on debt   

"The real stumbling-block of totalitarian r?gimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth."

Weil, Simone on despotism   

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

Weil, Simone on destiny   

"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."

Weil, Simone on action   

"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."

Weil, Simone on doctrine   

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

Weil, Simone on education   

"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"

Weil, Simone on enlightenment   

"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."

Weil, Simone on equality   

"Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror."

Weil, Simone on evil   

"I can, therefore I am."

Weil, Simone on existence   

"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."

Weil, Simone on faith   

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."

Weil, Simone on fiction   

"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."

Weil, Simone on force   

"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."

Weil, Simone on force   

"Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it"

Weil, Simone on friends and friendship
11 fans of this quote   

"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."

Weil, Simone on friends and friendship
3 fans of this quote   

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

Weil, Simone on the future   

"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."

Weil, Simone on genius   

"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."

Weil, Simone on aid and assistance   

"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."

Weil, Simone on aid and assistance   

"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."

Weil, Simone on god
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Weil, Simone on god   

"In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it."

Weil, Simone on god   

"At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done"

Weil, Simone on goodness   

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

Weil, Simone on grief   

"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."

Weil, Simone on humanism   

"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."

Weil, Simone on humankind   

"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."

Weil, Simone on imagination   

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life."

Weil, Simone on imagination
3 fans of this quote   

"A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves."

Weil, Simone on justice
4 fans of this quote   

"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."

Weil, Simone on intelligence and intellectuals   

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

Weil, Simone on intelligence and intellectuals   

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

Weil, Simone on jesus christ   

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

Weil, Simone on language   

"It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time 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."

Weil, Simone on liberty   

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God."

Weil, Simone on life   

"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above,"

Weil, Simone on achievement
3 fans of this quote   

"Nothing is less instructive than a machine."

Weil, Simone on machinery   

"Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence."

Weil, Simone on mathematics
4 fans of this quote