Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.”

— Simone Weil

52. “To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

55. “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”

— Simone Weil

56. “Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.”

— Simone Weil

57. “The future is made of the same stuff as the present.”

— Simone Weil

58. “At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done.”

— Simone Weil

59. “One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

61. “If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

63. “Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.”

— Simone Weil

64. “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.”

— Simone Weil

65. “All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

67. “Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”

— Simone Weil

68. “Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth.”

— Simone Weil

69. “The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

— Simone Weil

70. “If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

— Simone Weil

71. “Love is not consolation, it is light.”

— Simone Weil

72. “The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

— Simone Weil

73. “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.”

— Simone Weil

74. “Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.”

— Simone Weil

75. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”

— Simone Weil

76. “Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.”

— Simone Weil

77. “Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

— Simone Weil

78. “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.”

— Simone Weil

79. “The only great spirit of our time.”

— Simone Weil

80. “It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

84. “Political parties are a marvellous mechanism which, on the national scale, ensures that not a single mind can attend to the effort of perceiving, in public affairs, what is good, what is just, what is true. As a result – except for a very small number of fortuitous coincidences – nothing is decided, nothing is executed, but measures that run contrary to the public interest, to justice and to truth.”

— Simone Weil

85. “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.”

— Simone Weil

86. “Necessity is God’s veil.”

— Simone Weil

87. “A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.”

— Simone Weil

88. “Of these three sorts of lies – lying to the party, lying to the public, lying to oneself – the first is by far the least evil. Yet if belonging to a party compels one to lie all the time, in every instance, then the very existence of political parties is absolutely and unconditionally an evil.”

— Simone Weil

89. “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.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

91. “Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn’t uproot others.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

94. “Truth is one, but error is manifold.”

— Simone Weil

95. “God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.”

— Simone Weil

96. “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.”

— Simone Weil

97. “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.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

99. “God is not present, even if we invoke him, where the afflicted are merely regarded as an occasion for doing good. They may even be loved on this account, but then they are in their natural role, the role of matter and of things. We have to bring to them in their inert, anonymous condition a personal love... In true love it is not we who love the afflicted in God; it is God in us who loves them.”

— Simone Weil

100. “Science is a monopoly, not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say they can only believe, not assimilate.”

— Simone Weil