Simone Weil Quotes

346 Sourced Quotes

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
It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.
Law is the quality of the permanent provisions for making this aim effective.

Simone Weil
A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.

Simone Weil
What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?

Simone Weil
The human soul has need of disciplined participation in a common task of public value, and it has need of personal initiative within this participation.
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
In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes.
The human soul has need of some solitude and privacy and also of some social life.
The human soul has need of both personal property and collective property.

Simone Weil
Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.

Simone Weil
The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. … It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.

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

Simone Weil
Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.

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. This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else.

Simone Weil
The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know (in the scientific sense).

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

Simone Weil
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Simone Weil
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

Simone Weil
Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who, when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

Simone Weil
If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

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

Simone Weil
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: 'What are you going through?'

Simone Weil
In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.

Simone Weil
Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.

Simone Weil
"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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

Simone Weil
Such words as spontaneity, sincerity, gratuitousness, richness, enrichment — words which imply an almost total indifference to contrasts of value — have come more often from their [the surrealists'] pens than words which contain a reference to good and evil. Moreover, this latter class of words has become degraded, especially those which refer to the good, as Valéry remarked some years ago. Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man's character.

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

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
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, I am suffering, than to say, This landscape is ugly.

Simone Weil
We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.

Simone Weil
A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

Simone Weil
Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.

Simone Weil