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The stars, those marvelous, brilliant, inaccessible objects, at least as remote as the horizon, which we can neither change nor touch, and which in their turn, touch only our eyes, are what is furthest away from us and closest to us.
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There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
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Truth is a radiant manifestation of reality.
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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.
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We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.
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Science is today regarded by some as a mere catalogue of technical recipes, and others as a body of pure intellectual speculations which are sufficient unto themselves; the former set too little value on the intellect, the latter on the world.
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Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.
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Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity.
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Christ himself came down and took possession of me... I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God... in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.
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Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
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All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
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The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.
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Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.
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All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved.
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The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.
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Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.
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The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
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The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.
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Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.
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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.
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Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
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Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
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Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
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Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.
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As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.
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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
Simone de Beauvoir
French Philosopher
Hannah Arendt
American Philosopher
Edith Stein
German Philosopher
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