Simone Weil quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Simone Weil

Simone Weil Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Simone Weil on Wise Famous Quotes.

Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.

Humility is attentive patience.

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

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

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

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

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.

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

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.

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.

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.

Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing ...

Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is rooted himself doesn't uproot others.

No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt.

We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say 'I.

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

The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.

Fortunately the sky is beautiful everywhere.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

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.

War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.

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

Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.

The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.

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

Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.

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

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

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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.

Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.

In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.

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

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

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.

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

The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

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

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

The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.

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

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

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

Man alone can enslave man.

Time does us violence; it is the only violence.

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

Someone who does not see a pane of glass is not aware of not seeing it.

Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.

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.

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

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

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

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

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

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

Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.

The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

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

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.

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.

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

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

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.

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

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.

Distance is the soul of beauty.

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate ...

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

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.

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

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

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

An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that he may strip himself of it.

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

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

The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter.

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.

I can, therefore I am.

To find extraordinary difficulty in doing an ordinary action is a favor which calls for gratitude.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

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.

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