Quotes by Weil, Simone

"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."

Weil, Simone on morality   

"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."

Weil, Simone on murder   

"I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her."

Weil, Simone on nations   

"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."

Weil, Simone on obedience   

"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."

Weil, Simone on oppression   

"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."

Weil, Simone on oppression
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"Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."

Weil, Simone on pain
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"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."

Weil, Simone on pain
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"We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise."

Weil, Simone on paradise   

"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."

Weil, Simone on past   

"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."

Weil, Simone on philosophers and philosophy   

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."

Weil, Simone on art   

"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God."

Weil, Simone on atheism   

"Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached."

Weil, Simone on attachment
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"The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either"

Weil, Simone on power   

"To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."

Weil, Simone on power   

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

Weil, Simone on problems   

"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."

Weil, Simone on punishment   

"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."

Weil, Simone on purity   

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

Weil, Simone on purity   

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

Weil, Simone on reality   

"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."

Weil, Simone on reality   

"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."

Weil, Simone on right and rightness   

"To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is."

Weil, Simone on science   

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

Weil, Simone on skepticism   

"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."

Weil, Simone on socializing and socialism   

"In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention."

Weil, Simone on solitude   

"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."

Weil, Simone on sorrow   

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

Weil, Simone on soul   

"Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else."

Weil, Simone on state   

"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."

Weil, Simone on submission   

"The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard."

Weil, Simone on suffering   

"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."

Weil, Simone on beauty   

"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."

Weil, Simone on biography   

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

Weil, Simone on charity   

"The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough."

Weil, Simone on sympathy   

"In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself -- only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie."

Weil, Simone on truth   

"Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."

Weil, Simone on happiness   

"When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him."

Weil, Simone on victims   

"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."

Weil, Simone on war