Quotes By Simone Weil
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
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.
Simone Weil
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
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
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
Simone Weil
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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.
Simone Weil
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
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.
Simone Weil
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
Simone Weil
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
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.
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.
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
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