Simone Weil Quotes

Simone Weil Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Simone Weil quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Simone Weil. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

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

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

By Simone Weil
The most important part of teaching = to teach what it is to know.

By Simone Weil
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility ...

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

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

By Simone Weil
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.

By Simone Weil
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

By Simone Weil
In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself -- only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.

By Simone Weil
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

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

By Simone Weil
To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.

By Simone Weil
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.

By Simone Weil
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.

By Simone Weil
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

By Simone Weil
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.

By Simone Weil
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?

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

By Simone Weil
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

By Simone Weil
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

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

By Simone Weil
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either

By Simone Weil
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.

By Simone Weil
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

By 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.

By Simone Weil
I can, therefore I am.

By Simone Weil
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

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

By Simone Weil
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

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

By Simone Weil