Quotes from Simone Weil

The desire to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the desire for the Incarnation. If we think it is something else, we are mistaken. The Incarnation alone can satisfy it. It is also wrong to reproach those mystics who sometimes employ the language of lovers. They are the legitimate owners. The others are only right to borrow it.

Even the notion of 'miracle' is Western and modern; it is connected to the scientific conception of the world, with which it is nevertheless incompatible. What we regard as miracles, the Hindus see as natural effects of exceptional powers that are found in a few people, and more often in the saints. They thus constitute a presumption of saintliness.

Throughout history men have struggled, suffered and died to free the oppressed. Their efforts, when they did not remain sterile, have never led to anything except the replacing of one oppressive régime by another.

Carnal love in all its forms, from the highest—true marriage or platonic love—to the most base, down to debauchery, has the beauty of the world for its object. Love that gives itself to the spectacle of the heavens, the plains, the sea, the mountains or the silence of nature senses this love in a thousand faint sounds, breaths of wind and the warmth of the sun.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

Those who believe they have discerned the particular designs of Providence resemble professors who give themselves to what they call 'explication of the text' at the expense of a beautiful poem.

No hay esperanza para el vagabundo que está de pie en el magistrado. Si a través de sus balbuceos brota algo desgarrador que atraviesa el alma, no será escuchado ni por el magistrado, ni por los circunstantes. Es un grito mudo. Y los desgraciados entre ellos son casi siempre también sordos, los unos para los otros. Y cada desgraciado, bajo la presión de la indiferencia general, trata, mediante la mentira o la inconsciencia, de hacerse sordo a sí mismo.

But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in this life, into something which is almost equivalent to hell. — Simone Weil

The idea of a person's being a thing ... constantly aspiring to be ... and never achieving it--here, surely, is death but death spread out over a whole lifetime; here, surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing.

The mysteries of the faith are not an object for the intelligence as the faculty which permits affirmation or denial. They are not of the order of the truth, but above it. The only part of the human soul capable of real contact with them is the faculty of supernatural love. Therefore, it alone is capable of adherence to them.

God created our autonomy so we would have the possibility of renouncing it for love. For that very reason we must desire to conserve the autonomy in our fellows.

The love of institutional religion, even though the name of God is necessarily present there, is nevertheless not an explicit love by itself, but an implicit love of God. For it does not include direct and immediate contact with God. God is present in religious practices when they are pure, in the same way God is in our neighbour or in the beauty of the world; not any further.

But Christ granted to his beloved friend, and without a doubt all those of his spiritual lineage, to come to him without degradation, defilement or distress, but in joy, purity and uninterrupted sweetness.

A society like the Church, which claims to be divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains than on account of the evil which sullies it.

Christ should not be absent where one works or where one studies. Every human being should be able, whatever they do, wherever they are, to have their gaze fixed throughout the whole of each day on the bronze Serpent.

Our Father only resides in secret. Love should not go without modesty. True faith implies great discretion even over against itself. It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have almost no part.

The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction.

2 prisonniers, dans des cachots voisins, qui communiquent par des coups frappés contre le mur. Le mur est ce qui les sépare, mais aussi ce qui leur permet de communiquer. Ainsi nous et Dieu. Toute séparation est un lien

La science, aujourd'hui, cherchera une source d'inspiration au-dessus d'elle ou périra

No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt.

Il faut avoir eu par la joie la révélation de la réalité pour trouver la réalité dans la souffrance. Autrement la vie n'est qu'un rêve plus ou moins mauvais. Il faut parvenir à trouver une réalité plus pleine encore dans la souffrance qui est néant et vide. De même il faut aimer beaucoup la vie pour aimer encore davantage la mort.

we have to fix our will on the void—to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void. It has nothing to do with an intellectual process in the present-day sense. The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground. It is only good for servile tasks.

Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others. Whoever is not uprooted himself does not uproot others.

Je ne dois pas aimer ma souffrance parce qu'elle est utile, mais parce qu'elle est.