Quotes from Simone Weil

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.

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.

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

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

The only great spirit of our time.

All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time.

We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Renunciation is submission to time.

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty.

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.

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

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

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.

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky.

The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

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

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.