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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

308. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

314. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— 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. “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

319. “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

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

— 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. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “To love God all-powerless.”

— Simone Weil

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

333. “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

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

— Simone Weil

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil

343. “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

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

— 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. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Simone Weil