Quotes from Simone Weil

Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.

Chaque être crie en silence pour être lu autrement.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their time comes, will manufacture professors.

Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.

There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.

There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.

Man's great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.

The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.

Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.

Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.

It is not enough to have perceived such a notion, given it one's attention, understood it; it must be given a permanent place in the mind, so that it may be present even when one's attention is directed toward something else.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

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

Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.

It is incontestable that the void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction is from on high, for we grasp it the better the more we sharpen our natural faculties of intelligence, will and love. The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.

We are living through a period bereft of a future. Waiting for that which is to come is no longer a matter of hope, but of anguish.

Imagine that the devil is in the process of buying the soul of some poor afflicted being, and that someone, taking pity on the one afflicted, were to intervene in the debate and say to the devil: it is really shameful for you to offer only this price; the thing is worth at least twice that. This sinister farce is what is being played out in the workers' movement by the syndicates, parties, and intellectuals of the left.