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Simone Weil: 386 quotes27 likes

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace

“I can, therefore I am.”

Simone Weil

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

Simone Weil

“Humility is attentive patience.”

Simone Weil

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

Simone Weil

The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”

Simone Weil

“The most important part of education — to teach the meaning of to know”

Simone Weil

in the scientific sense
The last statement in her notebook
Waiting on God (1950)

“Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”

Simone Weil

“If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Detachment (1947), p. 260
Source: Gravity and Grace

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

Simone Weil book Waiting for God

Source: Waiting for God

“When I read the catechism of the Council of Trent, it seems as though I had nothing in common with the religion there set forth.”

Simone Weil Letter to a Priest

Letter to a Priest (1951)

“God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Love (1947), p. 270

“Action is the pointer which shows the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

L’action est l’aiguille indicatrice de la balance. Il ne faut pas toucher à l’aiguille, mais aux poids.
La pesanteur et la grâce (1948), p. 57
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 97

“Alexander is to a peasant proprietor what Don Juan is to a happily married husband.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 78, (1972 edition)

“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. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 181

“An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Contradiction (1947), p. 240