Simone Weil Quotes & Sayings

Prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it. — Simone Weil

The true God is the God we conceive as all-powerful, but Who nevertheless does not command it where He has the power, for God is found only in the heavens or here below in secret. — Simone Weil

But your greatest blessing was of another order. In gaining my friendship through your charity - I have never encountered its equal - you have furnished me with a source of inspiration more powerful and more pure that one could find among human things. For nothing among human things is as powerful for maintaining our gaze, applied ever more intensely on God, than friendship with the friends of God. — Simone Weil

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. — 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

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication. — Simone Weil

If there were no affliction in this world we might think we were in paradise. — Simone Weil

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

Conformity is an imitation of grace. — Simone Weil

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

The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it. — Simone Weil

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes. — Simone Weil

Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable. — Simone Weil

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

Compassion directed to oneself is humility. — Simone Weil

We cannot take a single step towards heaven.
It is not In our power to travel in a vertical direction.
If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up.
He raises us easily. — Simone Weil

Humility is attentive patience. — Simone Weil

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

But we can be nearly sure that those whose love for God has caused their pure loves here below to disappear are false friends of God. Our neighbour, our friends, religious ceremonies and the beauty of the world do not fall in rank to unreal things after direct contact between God and the soul. On the contrary, only then do these things become real. Previously, they were half-dreams. Previously, they had no reality. — Simone Weil

Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. — Simone Weil

Everybody knows that really intimate conversation is only possible between two or three. As soon as there are six or seven, collective language begins to dominate. That is why it is a complete misinterpretation to apply to the Church the words 'Wheresoever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.' Christ did not say two hundred, or fifty, or ten. He said two or three. — Simone Weil

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul. — Simone Weil

The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life. — Simone Weil

Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry. — Simone Weil

When we hit a nail with a hammer the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into a point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and head of the nail were infinitely big, if would be just the same; the point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of the soul, and social degradation all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time — Simone Weil

I had never read any of the mystics, because I have never felt called to read them. In reading, as in other things, I always attempt practical obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I do not read anything except for that which I am hungry in the moment, when I am hungry for it, and then I do not read ... I eat. God mercifully prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it would be evident to me that I had not fabricated this absolutely unexpected contact. — Simone Weil

God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. — Simone Weil

The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it. — Simone Weil

All sins are attempts to fill voids. — Simone Weil

There is nothing that comes closer to true humility than the intelligence. It is impossible to feel pride in one's intelligence at the moment when one really and truly exercises it. — Simone Weil

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith ; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong. — Simone Weil

The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love. — Simone Weil

God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of His with the certainty of experience. I have touched it. — Simone Weil

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

War is the supreme form of prestige. — Simone Weil

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God. — Simone Weil

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it. — Simone Weil

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good. — Simone Weil

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it. — Simone Weil

Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it. — Simone Weil

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void. — Simone Weil

Power ... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood. — Simone Weil

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence. — Simone Weil

A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist. — Simone Weil

For the soldier death is the future, the future his profession assigns him. Yet the idea of man's having death for a future is abhorrent to nature. Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. — Simone Weil

We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do. — Simone Weil

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, "This landscape is ugly. — Simone Weil

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him. — Simone Weil

The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate ... — Simone Weil

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them. — Simone Weil

Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the "I" from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. — Simone Weil

He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice. — Simone Weil

If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul. — Simone Weil

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge. — Simone Weil

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. — Simone Weil

What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them. — Simone Weil

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

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. — Simone Weil

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement. — Simone Weil

Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. — Simone Weil

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful. — Simone Weil

The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all. — Simone Weil

Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everybody bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent and as inhuman as someone else but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in such a confrontation.1
Simone Weil — Simone Weil

The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself. — Simone Weil

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. — Simone Weil

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure. — Simone Weil

Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it. — Simone Weil

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through? — Simone Weil

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

Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science . And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics ... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it. — Simone Weil

In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it. — Simone Weil

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. — Simone Weil

The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary. — Simone Weil

We must love all facts, not for their consequences, but because in each fact God is there present. — Simone Weil

Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it. — Simone Weil

The world is God's language to us. — Simone Weil

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God. — Simone Weil

Either God is not all-powerful, or God is not absolutely good, or God does not command wherever He has the power to do so. So the existence of evil here below, far from being a proof against the reality of God, is what reveals Him to us in truth. — Simone Weil

Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light [-] It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church. — Simone Weil

One recognises that the partisan spirit makes people blind, makes them deaf to justice, pushes even decent men cruelly to persecute innocent targets. One recognises it, and yet nobody suggests getting rid of the organisations that generate such evils. — Simone Weil

Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on. — Simone Weil

Time does us violence; it is the only violence. — Simone Weil

It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction. — Simone Weil

We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. — Simone Weil

The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. — Simone Weil

Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth. — Simone Weil

We only possess what we renounce; what we do not renounce escapes from us. — Simone Weil

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

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it. — Simone Weil

We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery. We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, where God lives, are they one and the same operation. Children already experience this sorrow when they look at a cake for a long time and nearly regret eating it, but are powerless to help themselves. Maybe the vices, depravities and crimes are nearly always or even always in their essence attempts to eat beauty, to eat what one can only look at. Eve initiated this. If she lost our humanity by eating a fruit, the reverse attitude - looking at a fruit without eating it - must be what saves. — Simone Weil

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

It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom. — Simone Weil

The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it. — Simone Weil

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

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good- - that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity. — Simone Weil

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste. — Simone Weil

Patriotism is idolatry of the self. — Simone Weil

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence. — Simone Weil

I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose. — Simone Weil

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer. — Simone Weil