Simone Weil's Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

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

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

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

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

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

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

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

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.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

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.

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.

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

I can, therefore I am.

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

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

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.

Humility is attentive patience.

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

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

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

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

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

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

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.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

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

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

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.

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.

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.