Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Simone Weil. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Simone Weil
Simone Adolphine Weil ( VAY, French: [simɔn vɛj]; 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.
After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class.
Taking a path that was unusual[according to whom?] among 20th-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her. Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times".
Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively.
In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.
The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
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.
Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.
The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry , the only ersatz of God , the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself.
The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State.
Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive.
If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.
The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.
There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege.
Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
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.
We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing.
It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.
It is good to reflect about whatever forces us to come out of ourselves. I have difficulty in imagining how it can be that you really have some friendship for me; but as you apparently have, it may be for this purpose.
God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of His with the certainty of experience. I have touched it.
It sometimes happens that a thought, either formulated to oneself or not formulated at all, works secretly on the mind and yet has but little direct influence over it.
The instruments of power -- arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets -- always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable.
You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.
The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence.
To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.
The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.
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.
Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
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.
It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.
The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.
If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.
The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.
It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.
There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts.
Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.
It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void.
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.
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.
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
Longer Version:
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.
A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.
In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.
Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.
The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.
When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.
We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.
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.
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.
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it.
The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.
Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.
Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.
The Our Father contains all possible petitions; we cannot conceive of any prayer not already contained in it. It is to prayer what Christ is to humanity.
If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation whilst in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.
Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence -- that is beautiful.
We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us.
The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.
The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
Quotes by Simone Weil are featured in:
Friendship Quotes
Humility Quotes
Money Quotes
War Quotes
Love Quotes