Simone Weil Quotes

346 Sourced Quotes

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.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again

Simone Weil
Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three.

Simone Weil
Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.

Simone Weil
If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul.

Simone Weil
When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: "It is the trade entering his body." Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of God that are entering our body.

Simone Weil
It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world--and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish--she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.

Simone Weil
It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

Simone Weil
Science only offers three kinds of interest: 1. Technical applications. 2. A game of chess. 3. A road to God. (Attractions are added to the game of chess in the shape of competitions, prizes, and medals.)

Simone Weil
The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.

Simone Weil
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

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

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
Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.

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

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

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

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
Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

Simone Weil
We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.

Simone Weil
A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it.
Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.

Simone Weil
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

Simone Weil
At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Simone Weil
In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

Simone Weil
Conscience is deceived by the social. Our supplementary energy (imaginative) is to a great extent taken up with the social. It has to be detached from it. That is the most difficult of detachments.

Simone Weil