Quotes by Simone Weil

Simone Weil

Simone Weil

French philosopher

Lived from: 1909 - 1943

Category: Philosophers Country: FlagFrance

Born: 3 february 1909 Died: 24 august 1943

Quotes 61 till 80 of 80.

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  • There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
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  • Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
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  • To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
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  • To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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  • What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
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  • Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
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  • When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above,
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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  • Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
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  • With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
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