Simone Weil Quotes

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production.

Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.

Man alone can enslave man.

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.

I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.

The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all.

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do.

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

Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.

Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive

We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.

We must wish either for that which actually exists or for that which cannot in any way exist or, still better, for both. That which is and that which cannot be are both outside the realm of becoming.

Renunciation is submission to time.

Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.

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.

The only great spirit of our time.

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.

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

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

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

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

Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.

The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.

It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.

Fashion exerts more power in science than it does on the shape of hats.

There isn't a man on earth who doesn't at times pronounce an opinion on good and evil, even if it be only to find fault with somebody else.

Pain is the root of knowledge.

A work of art has an author and yet when it is perfect it has something which is anonymous about it.

Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it - except in the case of the very purest and they are rare.

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.

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

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

Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

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