Top 100 Weil Quotes
#1. Force," Simone Weil wrote, "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."2
Chris Hedges
#2. Simone Weil was absolutely right- beauty and affliction are the only two things that can pierce our hearts. Because this is so true, we must have a measure of beauty in our lives proportionate to our affliction. No more. Much more. Is this not God's prescription for us? Just take a look around.
John Eldredge
#3. Museums matter only to the extent that they are perceived to provide communities they serve with something of value beyond their mere existence." - STEPHEN WEIL
G. Wayne Clough
#4. I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
Iris Murdoch
#5. [Simone Weil's] life is almost a perfect blend of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin. In my own experience, everything funny I have written is more terrible than it is funny, or only funny because it is terrible, or only terrible because it is funny.
Flannery O'Connor
#6. When the hammer strikes a nail, the extreme force of the blow on the broad head is transmitted without loss to the point. The head of the nail is the whole of eternity and the point of that nail is pressed to the center of the human heart. " [ quoting Simone Weil from memory ]
George Oppen
#7. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. "Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light." 240.
Maggie Nelson
#8. I'm Opera Singer. I can sing Brecht, Weil.
Nina Hagen
#9. I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.
Francine Du Plessix Gray
#10. I'm from East Berlin. I grew up in the Bertold Brecht, Kurt Weil tradition, also in the old hippie tradition.
Nina Hagen
#11. A beautiful woman, Simone Weil said, seeing herself in the mirror, knows "This is I." An ugly woman knows with equal certainty, "This is not I." Maud knew this neat division represented an over-simplification. The doll-mask she saw had nothing to do with her, nothing.
A.S. Byatt
#12. Simone Weil is a mystery that should keep us all humble, and I need it more than most. Also she's the example of the religious consciousness without a religion which maybe sooner or later I will be able to write about.
Flannery O'Connor
#13. What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
Jenny Offill
#14. Fashion exerts more power in science than it does on the shape of hats.
Simone Weil
#16. Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
Simone Weil
#17. Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
Simone Weil
#18. If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.
Simone Weil
#19. If I bother to listen, I can navigate by failure just as much as I can navigate by success.
Sharon Weil
#20. I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
Simone Weil
#21. We often gain awareness through a baseline comparison between now and next.
Sharon Weil
#22. I find that low protein diets often contribute to improvement in patients with immune system problems ... In fact, it would be hard to become deficient in protein in our country even if you tried.
Andrew Weil
#23. Imagine that each time you inhale, that the universe is breathing into you, and as you exhale it is breathing out of you.
Andrew Weil
#24. All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
Simone Weil
#25. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
#26. The essence of health is inner balance.
Andrew Weil
#27. Ginny who lived her life with hair in the breeze, Stillman who lived his with it under his hat. And he loved her so much the worse for it.
Josh Weil
#28. We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.
Simone Weil
#29. In Europe, when tobacco was first introduced, it was immediately banned. In Turkey, if you got caught with tobacco, you had your nose slit. China and Russia imposed the death penalty for possession of tobacco.
Andrew Weil
#30. Even low-calorie diets and vigorous exercise fail to work in the long term for at least some people.
Andrew Weil
#31. The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.
Simone Weil
#32. Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.
Simone Weil
#33. The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.
Simone Weil
#34. A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Simone Weil
#35. 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
#36. The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
Simone Weil
#37. Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Simone Weil
#38. Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.
Simone Weil
#39. As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Simone Weil
#40. We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say 'I.
Simone Weil
#41. I can't believe you ran out on me, and I'm pretty sure you left your balls behind.
J.L. Weil
#42. Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
Simone Weil
#43. 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
#44. The Gospels: God's perfection consists in non-intervention.
Simone Weil
#45. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
Simone Weil
#46. One of the most obvious ways dogs can improve our physical and mental health is via daily walks.
Andrew Weil
#47. Dreaming is a phenomenon of purely individual consciousness, and consequently impossible to thoroughly deconstruct by a community of researchers. But dreaming matters.
Andrew Weil
#48. 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
#49. Given that I don't know anything, when I am making up stories about the future, why not make it a good story instead of a scary one?
Sharon Weil
#50. We're all affected by music. It has the power to inspire, uplift us, change our moods, and even alter consciousness.
Andrew Weil
#51. In the future, as in the past, the great ideas [of mathematics] must be simplifying ideas, the creator must always be one who clarifies, for himself, and for others, the most complicated issues of formulas and concepts.
Andre Weil
#52. 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
#53. Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.
Simone Weil
#54. Most American diets, even bad ones, provide more than enough calcium for bone health, especially for men.
Andrew Weil
#55. Travis, if I don't come back ... avenge me."
Dimples in full view, Travis laughed. "It would be my pleasure.
J.L. Weil
#56. There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
Simone Weil
#57. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?
Simone Weil
#58. To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
Simone Weil
#59. Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.
Simone Weil
#60. In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.
Simone Weil
#61. Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .
Simone Weil
#62. Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
Simone Weil
#63. We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.
Simone Weil
#64. Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
Simone Weil
#65. 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
#66. It is unrealistic to want to be happy all the time.
Andrew Weil
#67. 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
#68. There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
Simone Weil
#69. School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
Simone Weil
#70. 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
#71. The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.
Simone Weil
#72. The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.
Simone Weil
#73. The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
Simone Weil
#74. Improper breathing is a common cause of ill health. If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip, it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly. There is no single more powerful -or more simple- daily practice to further your health and well being than breathwork.
Andrew Weil
#75. In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Simone Weil
#76. Isolation is at the heart of all disease, therefore healing requires community and the support of others.
Sharon Weil
#77. Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.
Simone Weil
#78. Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
Simone Weil
#79. Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
Simone Weil
#80. The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.
Simone Weil
#81. Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.
Simone Weil
#82. It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
Simone Weil
#83. 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
#84. To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.
Simone Weil
#85. When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
Simone Weil
#86. One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
Simone Weil
#87. The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.
Simone Weil
#88. Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.
Simone Weil
#89. Most disease is lifestyle related and preventable
Andrew Weil
#90. Learning to focus attention and concentration is very useful; meditation can help you do that.
Andrew Weil
#91. Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
Simone Weil
#92. We were very fortunate to have been on the scene when we were.
Cynthia Weil
#93. The natural world is built upon common motifs and patterns. Recognizing patterns in nature creates a map for locating yourself in change, and anticipation what is yet to come.
Sharon Weil
#94. 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
#95. At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
Simone Weil
#96. The practice of deep listening is the practice of open inquiry, without assumption or judgement.
Sharon Weil
#97. The more I can accept the fact that change is moving all the time, and that the change I am experiencing right now is just the change of this moment and that this moment will change into the next and the next, the less need I will have to clutch in fear.
Sharon Weil
#98. The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
Simone Weil
#99. Official history is believing the murderers at their word.
Simone Weil
#100. If the traditional Rs (reading, writing, and arithmetic) are the basics that we want our children to master academically, then reverence, respect, and responsibility are the three Rs that our children need to master for the sake of their souls and the health of the world.
Zoe Weil
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