Simone Weil
Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.Collection: Power
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Equality
Humility is attentive patience.Collection: Patience
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.Collection: Dreams
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.Collection: Intelligence
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.Collection: Intelligence
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.Collection: God
I can, therefore I am.Collection: Motivational
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.Collection: War
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.Collection: Beauty
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Imagination
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Respect
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Chance
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.Collection: Friendship
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.Collection: Society
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.Collection: Teacher
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.Collection: Intelligence
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.Collection: Imagination
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.Collection: Great
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
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.
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
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.
Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
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.
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
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.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
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.
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.