Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
• Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable…
• Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
• At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in…
• In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of…
• We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The…
• The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is…
• The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical…
• Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
• 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…
• 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…
• Contradiction is the lever of transcendence.
• The need for truth is more sacred than any other need.
• Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.
• It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.
• Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this…
• There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
• Official history is believing the murderers at their word.
• Distance is the soul of beauty.
• In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps)…

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