Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Simone Weil

203. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

206. “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

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

— Simone Weil

208. “One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

213. “Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.”

— Simone Weil

214. “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

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

— Simone Weil

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

221. “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

222. “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

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. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

228. “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

229. “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

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. “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

232. “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

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

— Simone Weil

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Simone Weil

241. “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

242. “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

243. “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

244. “A village idiot, in the literal sense, who really loves the truth, even when he only babbles, is in his thinking infinitely superior to Aristotle. He is infinitely nearer to Plato than Aristotle ever was.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

248. “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

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

— Simone Weil

250. “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