Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
• The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly,…
• To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at…
• When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or…
• Education-whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people-consists in creating motives.
• Time's violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters.
• There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is…
• Power ... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.
• Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
• Every kind of reward constitutes a degradation of energy.
• The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should…
• Man alone can enslave man.
• The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood…
• As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent…
• Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to…
• When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: "It is the trade entering his body."…
• The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
• It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the…
• The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
• Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs…

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