Simone Weil quotes:

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

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.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.

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.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.

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.

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.

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.

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

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

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.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

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.

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

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

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.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

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

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

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.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

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.

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.

But nothing of all that the peoples of Europe have produced is worth the first known poem to have appeared among them. Perhaps they will rediscover that epic genius when they learn how to accept the fact that nothing is sheltered from fate, how never to admire might, or hate the enemy, or to despise sufferers. It is doubtful if this will happen soon."

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.

Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

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

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.

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.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: "It is the trade entering his body." Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of God that are entering our body.

The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.

Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

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.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

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.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

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

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

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.

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

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.

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.

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

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

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.

When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

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.

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.

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.

A well ordered society would be one where the State only had a negative action, comparable to that of a rudder: a light pressure at the right moment to counteract the first suggestion of any loss of equilibrium.

The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry

If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.

The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.

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.

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

Patriotism is idolatry of the self.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

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.

Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed.

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

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

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Humility is attentive patience.

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

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

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.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

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.

...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.

[We are not] to take one step, even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word, and thought.

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.

A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again

A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.

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