Simone Weil Quotes

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.

the instruments of power - arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets - always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.

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.

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.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

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.

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.

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.

There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.

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

To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul.

Official history is believing the murderers at their word.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

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

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

Time does us violence; it is the only violence.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.

Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.

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.

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.

It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.

Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.

Joy is being fully aware of reality.

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and 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.