Quotes About Simone Weil

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.

[We are not] to take one step, even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word, and thought.

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.' All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

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

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

God can never be perfectly present to us here below on account of our flesh. But he can be almost perfectly absent from us in extreme affliction. This is the only possibility of perfection for us on earth. That is why the Cross is our only hope.

Such is the power of might. Its power to transform an into a thing double and it cuts both ways; it petrifies differently but equally the souls of those who suffer it, and of those who wield it.

Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous.

The Gospels: God's perfection consists in non-intervention.

He who believes in God is in danger of a still greater illusion—that of attributing to grace what is simply an essentially mechanical effect of nature.

A society like the Church, which claims to be divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains than on account of the evil which sullies it.

I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really loves is something other than nothingness.

The only great spirit of our time.

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

Simone Weil was surely right when she asked, "Isn't it the greatest possible disaster, when you are wrestling with God, not to be beaten?" God's invitation to the spiritual life is a call to the high-risk venture of being loved more fiercely than we ever might have dreamed.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

Here is what I learned: Simone Weil was right. Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

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.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

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 to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

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

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