Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

4. “All sins are attempts to fill voids.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

6. “I can, therefore I am.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

9. “True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

— Simone Weil

10. “Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

12. “We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

14. “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.”

— Simone Weil

15. “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.”

— Simone Weil

16. “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.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

19. “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.”

— Simone Weil

20. “The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.”

— Simone Weil

21. “The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.”

— Simone Weil

22. “Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny .”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

24. “It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

26. “One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.”

— Simone Weil

27. “Distance is the soul of beauty.”

— Simone Weil

28. “To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

30. “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”

— Simone Weil

31. “Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.”

— Simone Weil

32. “The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.”

— Simone Weil

33. “Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.”

— Simone Weil

34. “Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.”

— Simone Weil

35. “A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

37. “Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

— Simone Weil

38. “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

— Simone Weil

39. “We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.”

— Simone Weil

40. “Joy is being fully aware of reality...”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

42. “The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.”

— Simone Weil

43. “It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.”

— Simone Weil

44. “In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil.”

— Simone Weil

45. “Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.”

— Simone Weil

46. “The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter.”

— Simone Weil

47. “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.”

— Simone Weil

48. “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”

— Simone Weil

49. “Love: To feel with one’s whole self the existence of another being...”

— Simone Weil

50. “The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love.”

— Simone Weil