Simone Weil (1909–43) was a French essayist, political activist, philosopher, and religious mystic. She is well known for the strength of her commitments and the breadth and depth of her analysis of various facets of modern civilization.
Born in Paris to a Jewish-agnostic family, Simone attended École Normale Supérieure, but rejected a traditional academic career. She identified and lived with the poor and the oppressed, serving the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side, and working as a manual farm worker and in a car factory. In the late 1930s, she had the first of many mystical experiences that drew her to the Roman Catholic Church. She converted to Catholicism in 1938 and moved to England in 1942.
During World War II, Weil joined the French Resistance movement in England and starved in solidarity by consuming the same rations, as did her French compatriots who were inmates of the Nazi labor camps. Weil soon grew weak and died of tuberculosis.
Most of her works appeared after death; in her collected works, Weil explored the spiritually dampening effect of modern industrial life, the reasons for human exploitation, and the connection between the human condition and the realm of the transcendental. Weil’s notable works include La Pesanteur et la grâce (1949; Gravity and Grace, 1952,) L’Enracinement (1949; The Need for Roots, 1952,) Attente de Dieu (1950; Waiting for God, 1951,) and Cahiers (1952–55; Notebooks, 1956.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Simone Weil
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.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Communism, Socialism
A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again
—Simone Weil
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Heroes
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Oppression
The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Risk-taking
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Genius
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
—Simone Weil
Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
—Simone Weil
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity, Pain
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Nationalism, Nationality, Nation, Nations
The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Aid, Assistance, Help
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Living, Life
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Destiny
The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Debt
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attention
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Suffering
A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Reality
Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
—Simone Weil
To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don’t know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Science
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Time, The Past, Past
Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power
It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Aid, Assistance, Help
Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Evil, Goodness
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
—Simone Weil
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Morality, Morals
The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Suffering, Sympathy
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Pain
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Churches, Religion
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Imagination
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Communication
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
The role of the intelligence—that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Solitude
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”
—Simone Weil
Topics: Friendship
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Skepticism, Doubt
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Humanity
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attachment
In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself—only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Truth, Thought, Reason
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