Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Simone Weil

257. “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

258. “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

259. “Renunciation is submission to time.”

— 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. “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

262. “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

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. “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

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

— Simone Weil

268. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

274. “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

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

— Simone Weil

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Simone Weil

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Simone Weil

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Simone Weil

289. “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

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

— Simone Weil

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

298. “To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.”

— Simone Weil

299. “It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.”

— Simone Weil

300. “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