Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• Our patriotism comes straight from the Romans. This is why French children are encouraged to seek inspiration for it in Corneille. It is a pagan…
• Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
• The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility…
• To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
• Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for…
• 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…
• One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
• 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…
• Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
• Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.
• 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…
• Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like…
• We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.

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