Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 9

251. “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

252. “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

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

— Simone Weil

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Simone Weil

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

274. “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

275. “To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.”

— Simone Weil

276. “Renunciation is submission to time.”

— Simone Weil

277. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Simone Weil

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

289. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

293. “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

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. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

298. “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

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

— Simone Weil

300. “When we see the world, the image we see is not only a reflection of the world, it is also a reflection of us.”

— Simone Weil