Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

258. “The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate...”

— Simone Weil

259. “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

260. “Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.”

— Simone Weil

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Simone Weil

268. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

271. “In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

273. “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

274. “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

275. “Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

279. “If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.”

— Simone Weil

280. “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

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

— Simone Weil

282. “The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.”

— Simone Weil

283. “If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.”

— Simone Weil

284. “On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation.”

— Simone Weil

285. “Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

287. “There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.”

— Simone Weil

288. “The true God is the God we conceive as all-powerful, but Who nevertheless does not command it where He has the power, for God is found only in the heavens or here below in secret.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

290. “It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves... To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.”

— Simone Weil

291. “The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.”

— Simone Weil

292. “Man requires, not rice or potatoes, but food; not wood or coal, but heating. In the same way, for the needs of the soul, we must recognize the different, but equivalent, sorts of satisfaction which cater for the same requirements.”

— Simone Weil

293. “Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

295. “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

296. “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

298. “We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits – and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.”

— Simone Weil

299. “All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved.”

— 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