Simone Weil Quotes

346 Sourced Quotes

Humanity cannot progress by importing into theoretical study the processes of blind routine and haphazard experiment by which production has so long been dominated.

Simone Weil
One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever.

Simone Weil
Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.

Simone Weil
One is never got out of the cave, one comes out of it.

Simone Weil
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil
We should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe.

Simone Weil
Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.

Simone Weil
It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

Simone Weil
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.

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

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
It is not only in literature that fiction generates immorality. It does it also in life itself. For the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Reality provides us with some raw material, just as novelists often take a theme from a news item, but we envelop it in a fog in which, as in all fiction, values are reversed, so that evil is attractive and good is tedious.

Simone Weil
The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
It is impossible to feel equal respect for things that are in fact unequal unless the respect is given to something that is identical in all of them. Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world.
All human beings are absolutely identical in so far as they can be thought of as consisting of a centre, which is an unquenchable desire for good, surrounded by an accretion of psychical and bodily matter.

Simone Weil
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

Simone Weil
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime – namely, repressive justice.

Simone Weil
We possess nothing in the world — a mere chance can strip us of everything — except the power to say 'I'.

Simone Weil
Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

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

Simone Weil
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

Simone Weil
Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.

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
Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

Simone Weil
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
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 colour, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
There is no legitimate limit to the satisfaction of the needs of a human being except as imposed by necessity and by the needs of other human beings. The limit is only legitimate if the needs of all human beings receive an equal degree of attention.

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

Simone Weil
Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul.... When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

Simone Weil