Simone Weil Quotes

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

Man alone can enslave man.

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

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

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

There is no greater joy for me than looking at the sky on a clear night with an attention so concentrated that all my other thoughts disappear; then one can think that the stars enter into one's soul.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.

One must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

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.

Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego.

To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

...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.

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.

All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight -- the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.

Truth is one, but error is manifold.

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.

All the goods of this world...are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good.

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

The only great spirit of our time.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Armies under the control of ... a sovereign State cannot bring freedom to anyone.

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.

We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.

Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.

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

Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.