Quotes from Simone Weil

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

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.

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

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 sigh that you will recognize it.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

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

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

I can, therefore I am.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others.

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 need of truth is more sacred than any other need.

It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.