Simone Weil Quotations

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

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.

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.

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, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

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.

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.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

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.

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.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

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.

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.

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.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

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 would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

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 circumstances.

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

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.

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.

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.

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.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

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.

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.

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.

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.

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 their work that they have put the best of themselves.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

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.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?

Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.

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 do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again

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.

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 an ersatz greatness.

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

Truth is one, but error is manifold.

The Our Father is to prayer what Christ is to humanity.

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 hell itself.

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 either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.

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 we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.

Man alone can enslave man.

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.

Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.

The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavor, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.

A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him.

The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.