Simone Weil Quotes (116 Quotes)

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.

Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

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

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

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

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.

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.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

Dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.

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.

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.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

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

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

To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

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.

Humility is attentive patience.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.

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

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.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don't happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don't understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

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

Algebra and money are essentially levelers the first intellectually, the second effectively.

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

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.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

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.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make it.

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