Simone Weil Quotes

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego.

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

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

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

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.

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.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

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.

God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.

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

A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.

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

When war is waged, it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.

When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

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

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .

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

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.

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.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

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

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.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

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.

What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.