Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

153. “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

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

— Simone Weil

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Simone Weil

163. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Patriotism is idolatry of the self.”

— Simone Weil

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Fire destroys that which feeds it.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

176. “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

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

— Simone Weil

178. “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

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

— Simone Weil

180. “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

181. “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

182. “It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.”

— Simone Weil

183. “Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.”

— Simone Weil

184. “The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.”

— Simone Weil

185. “Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.”

— Simone Weil

186. “The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.”

— Simone Weil

187. “One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love – to serve the loved one without his knowing it – is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.”

— Simone Weil

188. “The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.”

— Simone Weil

189. “Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.”

— Simone Weil

190. “It is incontestable that the void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction is from on high, for we grasp it the better the more we sharpen our natural faculties of intelligence, will and love. The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.”

— Simone Weil

191. “A popular Spanish song says in words of marvelous truth: “If anyone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor.” Love sees what is invisible.”

— Simone Weil

192. “If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.”

— Simone Weil

193. “To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.”

— Simone Weil

194. “The world is God’s language to us.”

— Simone Weil

195. “Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.”

— Simone Weil

196. “Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.”

— Simone Weil

197. “If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.”

— Simone Weil

198. “It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.”

— Simone Weil

199. “A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”

— Simone Weil

200. “Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.”

— Simone Weil