The Best Simone Weil quotes

Distance is the soul of beauty. — Simone Weil

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul. — 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

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

If the error is thrust deeply enough into the soul, man cannot but succumb to it. — Simone Weil

Time’s violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters. — Simone Weil

The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself. — Simone Weil

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love. — 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

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul. — Simone Weil

Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable. — Simone Weil

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction. — Simone Weil

The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God. — Simone Weil

There is no greater joy for me than looking at the sky on a clear night with an attention so concentrated that all my other thoughts disappear; then one can think that the stars enter into one’s soul. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk. — Simone Weil

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise. — Simone Weil

The world is God’s language to us. — Simone Weil

The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. — Simone Weil

We possess nothing in the world–a mere chance can strip us of everything–except the power to say ‘I. — Simone Weil

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world. — Simone Weil

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another. — Simone Weil

The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague–stricken town needs doctors. — Simone Weil

On reaching a certain degree of pain we lose the world. — Simone Weil

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world. — Simone Weil

All the goods of this world…are finite and limited and radically incapable of satisfying the desire that perpetually burns within us for an infinite and perfect good. — Simone Weil

The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor. — Simone Weil

Joy is being fully aware of reality. — Simone Weil

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

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, ‘What are you going through? — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual. — Simone Weil

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

Love: To feel with one’s whole self the existence of another being. — Simone Weil

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication. — Simone Weil

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

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God. — Simone Weil

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. — Simone Weil

Love is not consolation, it is light. — Simone Weil

Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated. — Simone Weil

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

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love–to serve the loved one without his knowing it–is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism. — Simone Weil

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

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice. — Simone Weil

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

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. — Simone Weil

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. — Simone Weil

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest. — Simone Weil

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. — Simone Weil

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

Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist. — Simone Weil

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

The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it. — Simone Weil

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. — 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

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God. — Simone Weil

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

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life. — Simone Weil

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life. — 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

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder. — Simone Weil

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction. — Simone Weil

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

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

It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. — Simone Weil

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. — 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

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

In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil. — Simone Weil

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is. — Simone Weil

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. — Simone Weil

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

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. — Simone Weil

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence. — Simone Weil

The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be. — Simone Weil

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

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness. — Simone Weil

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order To oneself. — Simone Weil

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil. — Simone Weil

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him. — Simone Weil

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

Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

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

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

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

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being. — Simone Weil

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance. — Simone Weil

Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness. — Simone Weil

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction. — Simone Weil

The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it. — Simone Weil

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. — Simone Weil

No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. — Simone Weil