Simone Weil quotes Born: 02/03/1909 Died: 08/24/1943 Country: france

• 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) [destroy/past/future/europe]
• Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. (Simone Weil) [civilization & progress]
• 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) [payment/order/order]
• I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded. (Simone Weil) [roots]
• 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) [thing/god]
• Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers. (Simone Weil) [culture/willpower/more]
• 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) [suffering/misfortune/think/day]
• Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does. (Simone Weil) [charity/love/human/love]
• In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs. (Simone Weil) [church/organism/beliefs]
• 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) [being]
• 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) [truth]
• 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) [more]
• 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) [joy/art/life/order]
• 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) [meeting]
• 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) [god/matter]
• 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) [power/truth/writers/genius]
• 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) [human/more]
• The future is made of the same stuff as the present. (Simone Weil) [future/present]
• 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) [faith/reality]
• 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) [thing/god/more/more]
• In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish. (Simone Weil)
• 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) [equality/recognition/etiquette/attention]
• Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. (Simone Weil) [genius/virtue/humility]
• 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) [evil/suffering/sin/time]
• Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy. (Simone Weil) [time/think/sin/envy]
• Nothing is less instructive than a machine. (Simone Weil)
• 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) [slave/slavery/condition/time]
• A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. (Simone Weil) [degradation]
• Every perfect life is a parable invented by God. (Simone Weil) [perfect/life/god]
• 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) [humanism/thinking/truth/beauty]
• A mind enclosed in language is in prison. (Simone Weil) [mind/language/prison]

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Sun Mon Tue Wen Thu Fri Sat Apr 25 [65] 26 [51] 27 [71] 28 Apr 29 [10] 30 [58] 1 [2] 2 [50] 3 [73] 4 [75] 5 [35] May 6 [75] 7 [104] 8 [50] 9 10 [106] 11 [79] 12 [50] May 13 [50] 14 [8] 15 [75] 16 [114] 17 [50] 18 [112] 19 May 20 [79] 21 [76] 22 [59] 23 [43] 24 [61] 25 [71] 26 [50] May

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