Simone Weil Quotes

Someone who does not see a pane of glass is not aware of not seeing it.

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.

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work.

The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.

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.

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

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.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

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.

Patriotism is idolatry of the self.

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.

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.

Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.

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

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.

To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.

War is the supreme form of prestige.

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

Time's violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters.

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

Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn't uproot others.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

Necessity is God's veil.

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.

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.

prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

one is never got out of the cave, one comes out of it.

Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.