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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.
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In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends.
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It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.
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All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
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Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.
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The intelligent man who is proud of that intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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Culture — as we know it — is an instrument manipulated by teachers for manufacturing more teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
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The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism.
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The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.
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The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.
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In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
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Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
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The state of conformity is an imitation of grace. By a strange mystery — which is connected with the power of the social element — a profession can confer on quite ordinary men in their exercise of it, virtues which, if they were extended to all circumstances of life, would make of them heroes or saints.
But the power of the social element makes these virtues natural. Accordingly they need a compensation.
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If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.
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The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
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The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.
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Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
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We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist — or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.
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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.
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It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.
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The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.
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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 to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.
The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.
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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.
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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.
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Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.
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Quote of the day
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman, but an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any earthly force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Simone Weil
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Born:
February 3, 1909
Died:
August 24, 1943
(aged 34)
Bio:
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and political activist.
Known for:
Gravity and Grace
The Need for Roots
Simone Weil: An Anthology
Waiting on God
Notebooks of Simone Weil
Most used words:
human
god
man
soul
love
power
attention
evil
thought
life
truth
real
reality
social
order
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André Weil
French Mathematician
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