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 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
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
The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Philosophy
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attention, Happiness, Sadness, Unhappiness
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Difficulties, Pain, Adversity
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
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Soul
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Silver Linings, Blessings, Desire
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Culture
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Living, Life
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attachment
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”
—Simone Weil
Topics: Friendship
There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
—Simone Weil
Topics: War
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
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Serenity, Grief
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
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
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
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
Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Evil
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Power
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
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
—Simone Weil
Topics: War
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: Friendship, Friends
Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Imagination
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Atheism
The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
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
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