Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus – the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”

— Simone Weil

202. “To claim that theft or adultery or lying are “evil” simply reflects our degraded idea of good- – that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.”

— Simone Weil

203. “God’s love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God’s love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.”

— Simone Weil

204. “Time does us violence; it is the only violence.”

— Simone Weil

205. “Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.”

— Simone Weil

206. “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”

— Simone Weil

207. “Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.”

— Simone Weil

208. “The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either.”

— Simone Weil

209. “Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.”

— Simone Weil

210. “Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.”

— Simone Weil

211. “If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, ‘that fugitive from the camp of conquerors’.”

— Simone Weil

212. “The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds...”

— Simone Weil

213. “There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.”

— Simone Weil

214. “The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.”

— Simone Weil

215. “To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.”

— Simone Weil

216. “A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.”

— Simone Weil

217. “Man’s great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.”

— Simone Weil

218. “Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.”

— Simone Weil

219. “We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.”

— Simone Weil

220. “Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.”

— Simone Weil

221. “With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.”

— Simone Weil

222. “To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.”

— Simone Weil

223. “Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

225. “Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.”

— Simone Weil

226. “Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.”

— Simone Weil

227. “The Cross of Christ is the only gateway to knowledge.”

— Simone Weil

228. “The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.”

— Simone Weil

229. “If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.”

— Simone Weil

230. “Renunciation is submission to time.”

— Simone Weil

231. “Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity – the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.”

— Simone Weil

232. “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

233. “Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.”

— Simone Weil

234. “The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.”

— Simone Weil

235. “Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

237. “For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him. Yet the idea of man’s having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.”

— Simone Weil

238. “There are two forms of friendship: meeting and separation. They are indissoluble. Both of them contain some good, and this good of friendship is unique, for when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. As both forms contain the same good thing, they are both equally good.”

— Simone Weil

239. “Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.”

— Simone Weil

240. “A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again.”

— Simone Weil

241. “The institutions that regulate the public life of a country always influence the general mentality – such is the prestige of power. People have progressively developed the habit of thinking, in all domains, only in terms of being ‘in favour of’ or ‘against’ any opinion, and afterwards they seek arguments to support one of these two options. This is an exact transposition of the party spirit.”

— Simone Weil

242. “Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.”

— Simone Weil

243. “No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.”

— Simone Weil

244. “The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men’s inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

246. “An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.”

— Simone Weil

247. “There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”

— Simone Weil

248. “The petit-bourgeois temperament prefers the cosy picture of a slow, uninterrupted and endless progress. In both cases, the material growth of the party becomes the sole criterion by which to measure the good and the bad of all things. It is exactly as if the party were a head of cattle to be fattened, and as if the universe was created for its fattening.”

— Simone Weil

249. “It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.”

— Simone Weil

250. “The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.”

— Simone Weil