Simone Weil - Gravity and Grace

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Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

Simone Weil
Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.

Simone Weil
Science today will either have to seek a source of inspiration higher than itself or perish.

Simone Weil
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, I am suffering, than to say, This landscape is ugly.

Simone Weil
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

Simone Weil
If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

Simone Weil
But we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of the conquerors'.

Simone Weil
You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

Simone Weil
It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

Simone Weil
Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.

Simone Weil
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. "Imaginative literature," therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.

Simone Weil
We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

Simone Weil
The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

Simone Weil
Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.

Simone Weil
The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

Simone Weil
Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.

Simone Weil
The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Simone Weil
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

Simone Weil
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

Simone Weil
We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.

Simone Weil
Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Simone Weil
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

Simone Weil
Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.

Simone Weil
Time's violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

Simone Weil
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.

Simone Weil
Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.

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

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
All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight — the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.

Simone Weil
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

Simone Weil