Simone weil quotes

If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

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

To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.

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

I can, therefore I am.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

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.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.

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

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

The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Power ... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

Joy is being fully aware of reality.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

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.

Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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 we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.

The world is God's language to us.

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

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

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.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

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.

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.

Compassion directed to oneself is humility.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

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

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

The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

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.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

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

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.

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 to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

There is no greater joy for me than looking at the sky on a clear night with an attention so concentrated that all my other thoughts disappear; then one can think that the stars enter into one's soul.

Love is not consolation, it is light.

...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.

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

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

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

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

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.

In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

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.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

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

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

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.

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.

We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Laical education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up those treasures, and those of Christianity as well.

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.

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

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.

Humility is attentive patience.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

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

Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.

Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.

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.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

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

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

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.

Patriotism is idolatry of the self.

When war is waged, it is for the purpose of safeguarding or increasing one's capacity to make war. International politics are wholly involved in this vicious cycle. What is called national prestige consists in behaving always in such a way as to demoralize other nations by giving them the impression that, if it comes to war, one would certainly defeat them. What is called national security is an imaginary state of affairs in which one would retain the capacity to make war while depriving all other countries of it.

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.

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.

There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.

God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. 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. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

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

Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.

Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three.

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.

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

If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

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

Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.

The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.

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.

Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.

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 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.

We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.

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

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.

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.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

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