Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

203. “Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.”

— Simone Weil

204. “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

205. “As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.”

— Simone Weil

206. “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

207. “The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

210. “We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.”

— Simone Weil

211. “Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

213. “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

214. “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

215. “The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.”

— Simone Weil

216. “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

217. “There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one’s intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.”

— Simone Weil

218. “It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.”

— Simone Weil

219. “Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

221. “You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.”

— Simone Weil

222. “Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.”

— Simone Weil

223. “It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.”

— Simone Weil

224. “Time’s violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters.”

— Simone Weil

225. “The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make.”

— Simone Weil

226. “A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.”

— Simone Weil

227. “It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.”

— Simone Weil

228. “The apprehension of necessity is an imitation of creation.”

— Simone Weil

229. “The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.”

— Simone Weil

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Simone Weil

233. “We pretend that our present system is democratic, yet the people never have the chance nor the means to express their views on any problem of public life. Any issue that does not pertain to particular interests is abandoned to collective passions, which are systematically and officially inflamed.”

— Simone Weil

234. “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

235. “Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”

— Simone Weil

236. “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

237. “The Our Father is to prayer what Christ is to humanity.”

— Simone Weil

238. “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

239. “We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.”

— Simone Weil

240. “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

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

— Simone Weil

242. “We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.”

— Simone Weil

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

247. “The word ‘revolution’ is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their deaths; but which does not contain any content.”

— Simone Weil

248. “Fashion exerts more power in science than it does on the shape of hats.”

— Simone Weil

249. “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

250. “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