Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only…
• Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself…
• Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as…
• It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one…
• In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
• ...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking…
• A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
• The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
• It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in…
• To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.
• Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.
• The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
• Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
• All the goods of this world...are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and…
• We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
• Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in…
• The world is God's language to us.
• One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.
• The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality,…
• When we hit a nail with a hammer the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into a point…

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