Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
• 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…
• 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…
• Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms...
• Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being....
• The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
• Fire destroys that which feeds it.
• The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.…
• 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…
• 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…
• Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
• When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which…
• The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor.
• 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…
• 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…
• Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience;…
• The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
• 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…
• Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
• Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together;…

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