Quotes from Simone Weil

War is the supreme form of prestige.

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.

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.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

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.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.

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.

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

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.

Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

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

We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.

There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.

Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.

Humility is attentive patience.

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?