Quotes from Simone Weil

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.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

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

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.

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.' To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so."

Bourgeois society is infected by monomania the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being and only suffering teaches him this.

Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.

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

The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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

A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

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

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

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.