Simone Weil Quotes

Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

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

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

Power ... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer.

Humility is attentive patience.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

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.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

If we forgive God for his crime against us, which is to have made us finite creatures, He will forgive our crime against him, which is that we are finite creatures.

The world is God's language to us.

I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

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

Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.

We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

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

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.

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.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me.

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.

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

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