Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Simone Weil

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

267. “Renunciation is submission to time.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Simone Weil

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Simone Weil

277. “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

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

— Simone Weil

279. “An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.”

— Simone Weil

280. “The need for truth is more sacred than any other need.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

283. “To love purely is to consent to distance.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

286. “Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated.”

— Simone Weil

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Simone Weil

290. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

297. “I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle, without exception.”

— Simone Weil

298. “God alone is capable of loving God. We can only consent to give up our own feelings so as to allow free passage in our soul for this love. That is the meaning of denying oneself. We are created for this consent, and for this alone.”

— Simone Weil

299. “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

300. “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