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
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Imagination
We can only know one thing about God—that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
—Simone Weil
Topics: God
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Justice
Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Listening, Compassion
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
—Simone Weil
If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Satisfaction
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Albert Camus Algerian-born French Philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
Henri Bergson French Philosopher
Jacques Derrida French Philosopher, Literary Theorist
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon French Politician
Emma Goldman American Anarchist
Michel Foucault French Philosopher
Guy Debord French Philosopher
George Steiner American Culture Critic
Claude Levi-Strauss French Anthropologist