Simone Weil quotes
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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
-- Simone Weil -
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
-- Simone Weil -
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
-- Simone Weil -
I can, therefore I am.
-- Simone Weil -
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Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
-- Simone Weil -
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
-- Simone Weil -
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
-- Simone Weil -
We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.
-- Simone Weil -
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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.
-- Simone Weil -
If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.
-- Simone Weil -
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
-- Simone Weil -
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
-- Simone Weil -
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A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
-- Simone Weil -
To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal.
-- Simone Weil -
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.
-- Simone Weil -
At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
-- Simone Weil -
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We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
-- Simone Weil -
Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .
-- Simone Weil -
It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.
-- Simone Weil -
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
-- Simone Weil -
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Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
-- Simone Weil -
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 trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful.
-- Simone Weil -
God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.
-- Simone Weil -
To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
-- Simone Weil -
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The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
-- Simone Weil -
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
-- Simone Weil -
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
-- Simone Weil -
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
-- Simone Weil -
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For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
-- Simone Weil -
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
-- Simone Weil -
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
-- Simone Weil -
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
-- Simone Weil -
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Humility is attentive patience.
-- Simone Weil -
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
-- Simone Weil -
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
-- Simone Weil -
It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
-- Simone Weil -
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The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
-- Simone Weil -
He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
-- Simone Weil -
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
-- Simone Weil -
The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
-- Simone Weil -
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More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
-- Simone Weil -
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 falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.
-- Simone Weil -
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
-- Simone Weil -
Love is not consolation, it is light.
-- Simone Weil -
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Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
-- Simone Weil -
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
-- Simone Weil -
No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope.
-- Simone Weil -
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
-- Simone Weil -
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Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.
-- Simone Weil -
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
-- Simone Weil -
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
-- Simone Weil -
One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
-- Simone Weil -
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I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose.
-- Simone Weil -
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
-- Simone Weil -
Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.
-- Simone Weil -
Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
-- Simone Weil -
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True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.
-- Simone Weil -
We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,†than to say, “This landscape is ugly.
-- Simone Weil -
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
-- Simone Weil -
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
-- Simone Weil -
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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
-- Simone Weil -
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
-- Simone Weil -
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?
-- Simone Weil -
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done
-- Simone Weil -
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Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
-- Simone Weil -
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.
-- Simone Weil -
Fire destroys that which feeds it.
-- Simone Weil -
Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
-- Simone Weil -
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Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
-- Simone Weil -
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
-- Simone Weil -
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
-- Simone Weil -
Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.
-- Simone Weil -
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How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
-- 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.
-- Simone Weil -
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
-- Simone Weil -
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
-- Simone Weil -
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