Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “War is the supreme form of prestige.”

— Simone Weil

303. “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

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

— Simone Weil

305. “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

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

— Simone Weil

307. “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

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

— Simone Weil

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Simone Weil

312. “To love God all-powerless.”

— Simone Weil

313. “How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?”

— Simone Weil

314. “I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

316. “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

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

— Simone Weil

318. “There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

320. “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

321. “A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.”

— Simone Weil

322. “It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

326. “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

327. “The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

329. “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

330. “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

331. “A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.”

— Simone Weil

332. “What should he do? It is simple. If he can escape from the grip of the people who wield the whip, he must run away. If he could have evaded his tormentors in the first place, he should have.”

— Simone Weil

333. “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

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

— Simone Weil

335. “We should not seize upon these mysteries as truths, for that is impossible, but recognize the subordination to these mysteries which we love of all that we seize upon as truths. The intelligence can recognize this subordination by feeling that the love of these mysteries is the source of conceptions which it can seize upon as truths. Such should be the relationship between faith and love.”

— Simone Weil

336. “Yes, we are dreaming. Men of action and enterprise are dreamers; they prefer dream to reality. But they use arms to make others dream their dreams. The victor lives his dream; the vanquished lives another’s dream.”

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

338. “Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.”

— Simone Weil

339. “To conceive God as an all-powerful Person, or else, under the name of Christ, as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. For this reason we must love the perfection of the heavenly Father even in the diffusion of sunlight. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation in us – which is obedience – is the creative and ordained principle of the universe, such is the fullness of being.”

— Simone Weil

340. “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

341. “A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.”

— Simone Weil

342. “Evil inhabits the soul of a criminal without being felt there. It is felt in the heart of the man who is afflicted and innocent.”

— Simone Weil

343. “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

344. “It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God.”

— Simone Weil

345. “It is not enough to have perceived such a notion, given it one’s attention, understood it; it must be given a permanent place in the mind, so that it may be present even when one’s attention is directed toward something else.”

— Simone Weil

346. “Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms...”

— Simone Weil

347. “God mercifully prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it would be evident to me that I had not fabricated this absolutely unexpected contact.”

— Simone Weil

348. “The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.”

— Simone Weil

349. “The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.”

— Simone Weil

350. “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