Quotes By Simone Weil

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

I can, therefore I am.

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

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

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

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

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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

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