Simone Weil Quotes

346 Sourced Quotes

The needs of the soul can for the most part be listed in pairs of opposites which balance and complete one another.
The human soul has need of equality and of hierarchy.
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings. Hierarchy is the scale of responsibilities. Since attention is inclined to direct itself upwards and remain fixed, special provisions are necessary to ensure the effective compatibility of equality and hierarchy.

Simone Weil
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.

Simone Weil
If anyone possesses this faculty, then his attention is in reality directed beyond the world, whether he is aware of it or not.
The link which attaches the human being to the reality outside the world is, like the reality itself, beyond the reach of human faculties. The respect that it makes us feel as soon as it is recognized cannot be shown to us by evidence or testimony.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

Simone Weil
The intelligent man who is proud of that intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Simone Weil
Culture — as we know it — is an instrument manipulated by teachers for manufacturing more teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

Simone Weil
The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

Simone Weil
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

Simone Weil
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
If we want a love which will protect the soul from wounds we must love something other than God.

Simone Weil
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.

Simone Weil
The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
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.

Simone Weil
If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people's lives. All those who, with knowledge of his mind, have acquiesced in his exercise of the function are accessories to the crime.

Simone Weil
Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.

Simone Weil
God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

Simone Weil
We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Laical education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up those treasures, and those of Christianity as well.

Simone Weil
Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction.... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us; it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.

Simone Weil
There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought.

Simone Weil
The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.

Simone Weil
It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

Simone Weil
As far as possible I only read what I am hungry for, at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

Simone Weil