Top 400 Simone Weil Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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.”

— Simone Weil

358. “It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth.”

— Simone Weil

359. “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

360. “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

361. “Nothing is less instructive than a machine.”

— Simone Weil

362. “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

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

— Simone Weil

364. “The Gospels: God’s perfection consists in non-intervention.”

— Simone Weil

365. “When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.”

— Simone Weil

366. “Preserve your solitude.”

— Simone Weil

367. “The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.”

— Simone Weil

368. “Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.”

— Simone Weil

369. “History is a tissue of base and cruel acts in the midst of which a few drops of purity sparkle at long intervals.”

— Simone Weil

370. “The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.”

— Simone Weil

371. “I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.”

— Simone Weil

372. “There isn’t a man on earth who doesn’t at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.”

— Simone Weil

373. “A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.”

— Simone Weil

374. “If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.”

— Simone Weil

375. “We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.”

— Simone Weil

376. “Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.”

— Simone Weil

377. “Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved sorrowfully because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him.”

— Simone Weil

378. “We can only know one thing about God – that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.”

— Simone Weil

379. “Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.”

— Simone Weil

380. “Such is the power of might. Its power to transform an into a thing double and it cuts both ways; it petrifies differently but equally the souls of those who suffer it, and of those who wield it.”

— Simone Weil

381. “When water is set in motion by a violent, impetuous current, it ceases to reflect images. Its surface is no longer level; it can no more measure densities. Whether it is moved by a single current or by several conflicting ones, the disturbance is the same.”

— Simone Weil

382. “There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.”

— Simone Weil

383. “In general the relative value of the various religions is a very difficult thing to discern; it is almost impossible, perhaps quite impossible. For a religion is known only from inside.”

— Simone Weil

384. “The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty...”

— Simone Weil

385. “Man alone can enslave man.”

— Simone Weil

386. “The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.”

— Simone Weil

387. “All sins are attempts to fill voids.” because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside or us and we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but only God may fill it.”

— Simone Weil

388. “The fact of dying for what is strong robs death of its bitterness – and at the same time of all its value.”

— Simone Weil

389. “Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous.”

— Simone Weil

390. “Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstacy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.”

— Simone Weil

391. “There should not be the slightest discrepancy between one’s beliefs and one’s way of life.”

— Simone Weil

392. “Toda la publicidad, toda la propaganda, tan variada en sus formas, que busca excitar el deseo de lo superfluo, tanto en el campo como entre los obreros, debe ser considerada un crimen.”

— Simone Weil

393. “If the middle classes haven’t the same need of an apocalypse, it is because long rows of figures have a poetry, a prestige which tempers in some sort the boredom associated with money; whereas, when money is counted in sixpences, we have boredom in its pure, unadulterated state. Nevertheless, that taste shown by bourgeois, both great and small, for Fascism, indicates that, in spite of everything, they too can feel bored.”

— Simone Weil

394. “Human beings have roots by virtue of their real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape particular treasures of the past and particular expectations for the future.”

— Simone Weil

395. “Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food. It requires the strength of soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship.”

— Simone Weil

396. “Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing.”

— Simone Weil

397. “Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.”

— Simone Weil

398. “Truth lights up the soul in proportion to its purity, not in any sense to its quantity. It isn’t the quantity of metal which matters, but the degree of alloy. In this respect, a little pure gold is worth a lot of pure gold. A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth. Similarly, one perfect Greek statue contains as much beauty as two perfect Greek statues.”

— Simone Weil

399. “I have never caused anyone to weep. I have never spoken with a haughty voice. I have never made anyone afraid. I have never been deaf to words of justice and truth.”

— Simone Weil

400. “For the action of grace in our hearts is secret and silent.”

— Simone Weil