A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
- Simone Weil Quote

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

All sins are attempts to fill voids.
- Simone Weil Quote

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
- Simone Weil Quote

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
- Simone Weil Quote

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
- Simone Weil Quote

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
- Simone Weil Quote

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

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
- Simone Weil Quote

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
- Simone Weil Quote

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
- Simone Weil Quote

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
- Simone Weil Quote

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
- Simone Weil Quote

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
- Simone Weil Quote

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

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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.
- Simone Weil Quote

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
- Simone Weil Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote