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 mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Faith
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
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: Compassion, Listening
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
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Time, Past, The Past
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
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Rightness, Right
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
If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Desire, Silver Linings, Blessings
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attention
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
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Paradise
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
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Attachment
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
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
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
Humility is attentive patience.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Patience, Humility
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
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
—Simone Weil
Topics: Reality
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Oppression
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell
—Simone Weil
Topics: Intelligence
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
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Happiness, Attention, Unhappiness, Sadness
Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Christianity
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Churches, Religion
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
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
—Simone Weil
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Genius
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
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
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 be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Soul
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: Assistance, Help, Aid
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
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Problems
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: Legacy, Achievement
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Justice
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
—Simone Weil
Topics: Culture
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