Quotes from Simone Weil

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.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.

We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

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.

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

Pain is the root of knowledge.

Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it - except in the case of the very purest, and they are rare.

A hateful act is the transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.

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

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.

The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their 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.