Famous Simone Weil Quotations

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"Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention."
by Simone Weil
"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."
by Simone Weil
"Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being."
by Simone Weil
"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 him."
by Simone Weil
"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."
by Simone Weil
"All sins are attempts to fill voids."
by Simone Weil
"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 and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets."
by Simone Weil
"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors."
by Simone Weil
"Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty."
by Simone Weil
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life."
by Simone Weil
"Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being and only suffering teaches him this."
by Simone Weil
"Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money."
by Simone Weil
"The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through"
by Simone Weil
"To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself."
by Simone Weil
"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."
by Simone Weil
"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous."
by Simone Weil
"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction."
by Simone Weil
"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."
by Simone Weil
"Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does."
by Simone Weil
"The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at."
by Simone Weil
"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."
by Simone Weil
"Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror."
by Simone Weil
"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison."
by Simone Weil
"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."
by Simone Weil
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life."
by Simone Weil
"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."
by Simone Weil
"I can, therefore I am."
by Simone Weil
"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 from baseness of soul."
by Simone Weil
"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 one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."
by Simone Weil
"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 more than corpses."
by Simone Weil
"The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either"
by Simone Weil
"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."
by Simone Weil
"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."
by Simone Weil
"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."
by Simone Weil
"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."
by Simone Weil
"Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"
by Simone Weil
"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 dreams."
by Simone Weil
"One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights."
by Simone Weil
"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 is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else."
by Simone Weil
"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."
by Simone Weil
"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 least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is."
by Simone Weil
"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."
by Simone Weil
"The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard."
by Simone Weil
"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 consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself -- only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie."
by Simone Weil
"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."
by Simone Weil
"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict."
by Simone Weil
"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct ... and to refrain from destruction."
by Simone Weil
"Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."
by Simone Weil
"The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility ..."
by Simone Weil
"The most important part of teaching = to teach what it is to know."
by Simone Weil
"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."
by Simone Weil
"To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile."
by Simone Weil


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