Simone Weil Quotes

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

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

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

Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.

Humility is attentive patience.

Renunciation is submission to time.

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

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.

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

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.

Compassion directed to oneself is humility.

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

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

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

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

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

Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan virtue, if these two words are compatible. The word pagan, when applied to Rome, early possesses the significance charged with horror which the early Christian controversialists gave it. The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

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

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.

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

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.

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

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.

The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

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

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

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive

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

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.

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

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

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

A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.