Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
• Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
• Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
• The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.
• 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…
• The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the…
• 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.
• The only great spirit of our time.
• 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…
• Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom…
• I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
• One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
• I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have…
• The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
• Love is not consolation, it is light.
• Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
• One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards…
• 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…
• He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as…
• If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.

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