Quotes from Simone Weil

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

Humility is attentive patience.

To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.

Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.

We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

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

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

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

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.

Time's violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is to running.

One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

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

An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that he may strip himself of it.

The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.