Top 100 Simone Weil Quotes
#1. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.
Simone Weil
#2. The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.
Simone Weil
#3. A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Simone Weil
#4. Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive
Simone Weil
#5. The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
Simone Weil
#6. If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
Simone Weil
#7. No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.
Simone Weil
#8. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?
Simone Weil
#9. In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.
Simone Weil
#10. Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .
Simone Weil
#11. Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
Simone Weil
#12. The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
Simone Weil
#13. It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.
Simone Weil
#14. The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
Simone Weil
#15. To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
Simone Weil
#16. Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.
Simone Weil
#17. Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
Simone Weil
#18. Official history is believing the murderers at their word.
Simone Weil
#19. A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.
Simone Weil
#20. If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.
Simone Weil
#21. The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
Simone Weil
#22. In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil.
Simone Weil
#23. Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego.
Simone Weil
#24. Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.
Simone Weil
#25. Plato also knew clearly, and indicated by allusions in his works, the dogmas of the Trinity, mediation, the incarnation, the Passion and the notions of grace and salvation through love. He knew the essential truth. Namely, that God is good. He is only all-powerful in addition.
Simone Weil
#26. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
Simone Weil
#27. Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent.
Simone Weil
#28. Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.
Simone Weil
#29. Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
Simone Weil
#30. Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.
Simone Weil
#31. Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.
Simone Weil
#33. An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
Simone Weil
#34. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
Simone Weil
#35. We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.
Simone Weil
#36. 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
#37. On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.
Simone Weil
#38. Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth.
Simone Weil
#39. Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
Simone Weil
#40. 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
#41. Distance is the soul of the beautiful.
Simone Weil
#42. An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
Simone Weil
#43. The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
Simone Weil
#44. Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
Simone Weil
#45. To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.
Simone Weil
#46. The need for truth is more sacred than any other need.
Simone Weil
#47. Time's violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.
Simone Weil
#48. One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.
Simone Weil
#49. Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.
Simone Weil
#50. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
Simone Weil
#51. Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
Simone Weil
#52. 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
#53. A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
Simone Weil
#54. The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love.
Simone Weil
#55. The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil
#56. Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
Simone Weil
#57. 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
#58. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
Simone Weil
#59. Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Simone Weil
#60. True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.
Simone Weil
#61. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.
Simone Weil
#63. If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.
Simone Weil
#64. 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
#65. If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise.
Simone Weil
#66. 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
#67. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is to running.
Simone Weil
#68. The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
Simone Weil
#69. With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
Simone Weil
#70. The great error of nearly all studies of war ... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics ...
Simone Weil
#71. The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.
Simone Weil
#72. Yet no suffering befalls whoever relinquishes justice and truth, whereas the party system has painful penalties to chastise insubordination. These
Simone Weil
#73. If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.
Simone Weil
#74. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
Simone Weil
#76. The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
Simone Weil
#77. God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.
Simone Weil
#78. To find extraordinary difficulty in doing an ordinary action is a favor which calls for gratitude.
Simone Weil
#79. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.
Simone Weil
#80. What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
Simone Weil
#81. We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
Simone Weil
#82. A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.
Simone Weil
#83. Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry.
Simone Weil
#84. The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.
Simone Weil
#85. All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight
the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
Simone Weil
#86. One must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.
Simone Weil
#87. A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.
Simone Weil
#88. 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
#89. What a country calls its vital ... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.
Simone Weil
#90. 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
#91. The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
Simone Weil
#92. Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.
Simone Weil
#93. The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
Simone Weil
#94. Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
Simone Weil
#95. At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done
Simone Weil
#96. The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
Simone Weil
#97. Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
Simone Weil
#98. 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
#99. Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.
Simone Weil
#100. Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has itself taken on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.
Simone Weil
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