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
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
—Simone Weil
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Living, Life
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
Under the name of truth I also included beauty, virtue, and every kind of goodness, so that for me it was a question of a conception of the relationship between grace and desire. The conviction that had come to me was that when one hungers for bread one does not receive stones. But at that time I had not read the Gospel.
Just as I was certain that desire has in itself an efficacy in the realm of spiritual goodness whatever its form, I thought it was also possible that it might not be effective in any other realm.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Goodness
Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it
—Simone Weil
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
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
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Art, Arts, Artists
When a man’s life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men’s actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Injury
It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.
—Simone Weil
Topics: God
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
When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Achievement, Legacy
Nothing is less instructive than a machine.
—Simone Weil
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Punishment
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Genius
The role of the intelligence—that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Problems
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attention, Equality
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: Morals, Morality
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits—and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Slavery
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Part of The Whole, Teaching, Education
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
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Paradise
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Culture
I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
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
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
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: Goodness, Evil
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
As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Poverty
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