Simone Weil Quotes on Man (7 Quotes)

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.

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.

The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.

The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either

It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude for he is a thinking creature.

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being and only suffering teaches.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.