Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

105. “The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.”

— Simone Weil

106. “What should he do? It is simple. If he can escape from the grip of the people who wield the whip, he must run away. If he could have evaded his tormentors in the first place, he should have.”

— Simone Weil

107. “Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the hilt or the point.”

— Simone Weil

108. “Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

111. “There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

113. “In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.”

— Simone Weil

114. “Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

116. “The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate...”

— Simone Weil

117. “A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.”

— Simone Weil

118. “Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”

— Simone Weil

119. “Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

121. “It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.”

— Simone Weil

122. “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

123. “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

124. “War is the supreme form of prestige.”

— Simone Weil

125. “The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.”

— Simone Weil

126. “There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts.”

— Simone Weil

127. “How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?”

— Simone Weil

128. “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

129. “A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

131. “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

132. “We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.”

— Simone Weil

133. “Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.”

— Simone Weil

134. “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

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

— Simone Weil

136. “We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.”

— Simone Weil

137. “Always do what will cost you the most.”

— Simone Weil

138. “Physical labour is a daily death.”

— Simone Weil

139. “All mediocrity flies from the light.”

— Simone Weil

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Simone Weil

143. “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

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

— Simone Weil

145. “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

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

— Simone Weil

147. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

150. “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