Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Someone who does not see a pane of glass is not aware of not seeing it.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

55. “The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

58. “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

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

— Simone Weil

60. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

63. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

68. “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

72. “The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

74. “Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.”

— Simone Weil

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Simone Weil

79. “Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.”

— Simone Weil

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Simone Weil

85. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

89. “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

90. “War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

92. “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

93. “Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.”

— Simone Weil

94. “Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.”

— Simone Weil

95. “Nearly everywhere – often even when dealing with purely technical problems – instead of thinking, one merely takes sides: for or against. Such a choice replaces the activity of the mind. This is an intellectual leprosy; it originated in the political world and then spread through the land, contaminating all forms of thinking. This leprosy is killing us; it is doubtful whether it can be cured without first starting with the abolition of all political parties.”

— Simone Weil

96. “Necessity is God’s veil.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

98. “Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.”

— Simone Weil

99. “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

100. “To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.”

— Simone Weil