Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Simone Weil (French Philosopher, Political Activist)

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 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, Help, Assistance

With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Sadness, Sorrow

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

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Biography, Legacy

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Obedience

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Right, Rightness

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
—Simone Weil
Topics: War

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Churches, Religion

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Heroes

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Oppression

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

Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Culture

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

I can, therefore I am.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Existence

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

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

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

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

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Friends, Friendship

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Civilization

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Life, Living

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Principles

It would seem that man was born a slave, and that slavery is his natural condition. At the same time nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Liberty

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 contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Work

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Paradise

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

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

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