Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

304. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

308. “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

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

— Simone Weil

310. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

313. “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

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

— Simone Weil

315. “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

316. “God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope.”

— Simone Weil

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Simone Weil

320. “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

321. “It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

324. “What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

327. “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

328. “When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.”

— Simone Weil

329. “Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.”

— Simone Weil

330. “More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”

— Simone Weil

331. “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

332. “In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

— Simone Weil

333. “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

334. “Yet what is impossible in logic becomes true in life, and the contradiction lodged within the soul tears it to shreds.”

— Simone Weil

335. “To love God all-powerless.”

— Simone Weil

336. “We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.”

— Simone Weil

337. “The role of the intelligence – that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.”

— Simone Weil

338. “There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.”

— Simone Weil

339. “It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.”

— Simone Weil

340. “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”

— Simone Weil

341. “Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.”

— Simone Weil

342. “In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled – that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.”

— Simone Weil

343. “What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.”

— Simone Weil

344. “It’s as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion – for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent – took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups.”

— Simone Weil

345. “Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, ‘What is it?’ without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.”

— Simone Weil

346. “Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.”

— Simone Weil

347. “One might lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degree, are true.”

— Simone Weil

348. “Education – whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself – consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good – that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.”

— Simone Weil

349. “In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.”

— Simone Weil

350. “It sometimes happens that a thought, either formulated to oneself or not formulated at all, works secretly on the mind and yet has but little direct influence over it.”

— Simone Weil