Quotes from Simone Weil

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle, without exception.

The Cross of Christ is the only gateway to knowledge.

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God.

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

Love consents to everything and commands only those who consent to it. Love is abdication. God is abdication.

Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.

Tant que l'homme tolère d'avoir l'âme emplie de ses propres pensées, de ses pensées personnelles, il est entièrement soumis jusqu'au plus intime de ses pensées à la contrainte des besoins et au jeu mécanique de la force. S'il croit qu'il en est autrement, il est dans l'erreur. Mais tout change quand, par la vertu d'une véritable attention, il vide son âme pour y laisser pénétrer les pensées de la sagesse éternelle.

Man requires, not rice or potatoes, but food; not wood or coal, but heating. In the same way, for the needs of the soul, we must recognize the different, but equivalent, sorts of satisfaction which cater for the same requirements.

Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth.

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion --for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent-- took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups

Science is a monopoly, not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say they can only believe, not assimilate.

Of these three sorts of lies – lying to the party, lying to the public, lying to oneself – the first is by far the least evil. Yet if belonging to a party compels one to lie all the time, in every instance, then the very existence of political parties is absolutely and unconditionally an evil.

There should not be the slightest discrepancy between one's beliefs and one's way of life.

Man only escape 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.

Preserve your solitude.

Leggo, per quanto è possibile, soltanto ciò di cui ho fame, nel momento in cui ne ho fame, e allora non leggo: mi nutro.

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

L'amour charnel est une recherche de l'Incarnation. On veut aimer dans un être humain la beauté du monde, non pas la beauté du monde en général, mais cette beauté spécifique que le monde offre à chacun et qui correspond exactement à l'état de son corps et de son âme.

But your greatest blessing was of another order. In gaining my friendship through your charity— I have never encountered its equal— you have furnished me with a source of inspiration more powerful and more pure that one could find among human things. For nothing among human things is as powerful for maintaining our gaze, applied ever more intensely on God, than friendship with the friends of God.

All sins are attempts to fill voids. because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside or us and we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but only God may fill it.

One recognises that the partisan spirit makes people blind, makes them deaf to justice, pushes even decent men cruelly to persecute innocent targets. One recognises it, and yet nobody suggests getting rid of the organisations that generate such evils.

Nous ne possédons rien au monde - car le hasard peut tout nous ôter - sinon le pouvoir de dire je

A village idiot, in the literal sense, who really loves the truth, even when he only babbles, is in his thinking infinitely superior to Aristotle. He is infinitely nearer to Plato than Aristotle ever was.