Quotes from Simone Weil

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

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.

Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, from death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter.

Distance is the soul of the beautiful.

Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are evil simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

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.

Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).

The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.

La beauté séduit la chair pour obtenir la permission de passer jusqu'à l'âme.

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.

We cannot take a single step towards heaven. It is not In our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily.

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.