Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.”

— Simone Weil

102. “Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

104. “Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I’. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking.”

— Simone Weil

105. “Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.”

— Simone Weil

106. “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.”

— Simone Weil

107. “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.”

— Simone Weil

108. “Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

110. “At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.”

— Simone Weil

111. “Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.”

— Simone Weil

112. “To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”

— Simone Weil

113. “Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.”

— Simone Weil

114. “The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”

— Simone Weil

115. “The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.”

— Simone Weil

116. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

— Simone Weil

117. “Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”

— Simone Weil

118. “Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.”

— Simone Weil

119. “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.”

— Simone Weil

120. “When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.”

— Simone Weil

121. “There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.”

— Simone Weil

122. “I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.”

— Simone Weil

123. “Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.”

— Simone Weil

124. “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.”

— Simone Weil

125. “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.”

— Simone Weil

126. “The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.”

— Simone Weil

127. “Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.”

— Simone Weil

128. “When a man’s life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men’s actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.”

— Simone Weil

129. “Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

131. “Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.”

— Simone Weil

132. “Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

134. “School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.”

— Simone Weil

135. “Patriotism is idolatry of the self.”

— Simone Weil

136. “A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

138. “Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.”

— Simone Weil

139. “Fire destroys that which feeds it.”

— Simone Weil

140. “We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.”

— Simone Weil

141. “You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”

— Simone Weil

142. “Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.”

— Simone Weil

143. “It is to the prodigals... that the memory of their Father’s house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.”

— Simone Weil

144. “One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.”

— Simone Weil

145. “The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

— Simone Weil

146. “The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature, which infinitely exceed him when in inaction; there is only equilibrium in action by which man recreates his own life through work.”

— Simone Weil

147. “Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.”

— Simone Weil

148. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil