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Simone Weil (Philosopher)

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

— Simone Weil beauty

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

— Simone Weil art

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

— Simone Weil wit

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

— Simone Weil life

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

— Simone Weil intelligence

The role of the intelligence that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

— Simone Weil intelligence

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

— Simone Weil people

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

— Simone Weil life

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

— Simone Weil life

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 life

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

— Simone Weil god

The capacity to give ones 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 think

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

— Simone Weil attention

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

— Simone Weil art

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

— Simone Weil sin

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

— Simone Weil art

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.

— Simone Weil god

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.

— Simone Weil passion

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell

— Simone Weil intelligence

Humility is attentive patience.

— Simone Weil humility

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 man

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 soul

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

— Simone Weil lie

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 life

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.

— Simone Weil story

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.

— Simone Weil man

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

— Simone Weil future

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

— Simone Weil attention

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

— Simone Weil art

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.

— Simone Weil faith

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

— Simone Weil hope

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

— Simone Weil truth

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

— Simone Weil alcohol

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 soul

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

— Simone Weil pain

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

— Simone Weil society

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

— Simone Weil self

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

— Simone Weil soul

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

— Simone Weil power

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.

— Simone Weil morality

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 work

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.

— Simone Weil pain

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.

— Simone Weil god

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

— Simone Weil hell

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

— Simone Weil war

I can, therefore I am.

— Simone Weil

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

— Simone Weil country

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 man

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

— Simone Weil success

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

— Simone Weil suffering

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

— Simone Weil struggle

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

— Simone Weil belief

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

— Simone Weil power

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