Quotes By Simone Weil

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.

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

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

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.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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.

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.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.