Simone Weil Quotes
A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.
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.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
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.
The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue.
The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry , the only ersatz of God , the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.
The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their deaths; but which does not contain any content.
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.
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.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
One must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.
The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
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.
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.
Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.
One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth.
All the Freudian system is impregnated with the prejudice which it makes it its mission to fight -- the prejudice that everything sexual is vile.
The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.
The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.
Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.
If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.
To be innocent is to bear the weight of the entire universe. It is to throw away the counterweight.
