Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous…
• Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life.
• Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is…
• We are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light.
• Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.
• One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is…
• The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit…
• There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
• It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
• Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
• The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make.
• It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.
• The Our Father is to prayer what Christ is to humanity.
• Truth is one, but error is manifold.
• To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in…
• On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world.
• There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.
• Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens…
• The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware,…
• A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not…

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