Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 9

251. “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

252. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

257. “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

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

— Simone Weil

259. “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

260. “Renunciation is submission to time.”

— Simone Weil

261. “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

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

— Simone Weil

263. “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

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

— Simone Weil

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

269. “The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

271. “The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

273. “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

274. “Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.”

— Simone Weil

275. “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

276. “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

277. “When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.”

— Simone Weil

278. “Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.”

— Simone Weil

279. “The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.”

— Simone Weil

280. “Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.”

— Simone Weil

281. “Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.”

— Simone Weil

282. “The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.”

— Simone Weil

283. “The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.”

— Simone Weil

284. “The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.”

— Simone Weil

285. “The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.”

— Simone Weil

286. “To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”

— Simone Weil

287. “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

288. “Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the “I” from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.”

— Simone Weil

289. “A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.”

— Simone Weil

290. “One recognises that the partisan spirit makes people blind, makes them deaf to justice, pushes even decent men cruelly to persecute innocent targets. One recognises it, and yet nobody suggests getting rid of the organisations that generate such evils.”

— Simone Weil

291. “We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing...”

— Simone Weil

292. “Thus it happens that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed.”

— Simone Weil

293. “On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.”

— Simone Weil

294. “Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.”

— Simone Weil

295. “If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent.”

— Simone Weil

296. “The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.”

— Simone Weil

297. “Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.”

— Simone Weil

298. “Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

— Simone Weil

299. “Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.”

— Simone Weil

300. “Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?”

— Simone Weil