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.)
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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
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
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Friendship
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Pain, Difficulties, Adversity
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
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
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Silver Linings, Desire, Blessings
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
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
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
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
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Murder
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Right, Rightness
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Heroes
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
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
—Simone Weil
Topics: The Future, Tomorrow, The Present, Future
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
—Simone Weil
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done
—Simone Weil
Topics: Goodness
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
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: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
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 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
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
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Serenity, Grief
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Language
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: Reason, Thought, Truth
Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Appropriateness, Aptness
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
A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
—Simone Weil
Topics: War
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Unhappiness, Happiness, Sadness, Attention
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