Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.
After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class.
Taking a path that was unusual among 20th-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her. Albert Camus described her as “the only great spirit of our times”. (via Wikipedia)
Following are some of the great quotes by Simone Weil:
On Life:
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
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.
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.
On Love:
Love is not consolation. It is light.
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?
On Learning:
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
On God:
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God’s being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it.
On Human:
Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
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.
Other Quotes:
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.
A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.