Simone Weil Quotes

239 quotes in 2557 categories

• A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
• Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to…
• In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
• Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
• The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
• What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.
• A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to…
• Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
• Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
• The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
• The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
• To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
• Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
• Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no…
• Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials,…
• Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless…
• There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not…
• If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians…
• If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it…
• I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of…

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