Quotes from Simone Weil

The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.

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.

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.

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring, real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. "Imaginative literature," therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.

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

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

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.

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.

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.

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

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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

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

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.

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.

Man alone can enslave man.

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.

The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

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.

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.