1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes
page 4

Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. The mathematician André Weil was her brother.After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the Anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class.

Taking a path that was unusual among twentieth-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, though most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her.Albert Camus described her as "the only great spirit of our times". Wikipedia  

✵ 3. February 1909 – 24. August 1943   •   Other names Simone Weilová
Simone Weil photo
Simone Weil: 193   quotes 27   likes

Simone Weil Quotes

“If people were told: what makes carnal desire imperious in you is not its pure carnal element. It is the fact that you put into it the essential part of yourself—the need for Unity, the need for God — they wouldn’t believe it. To them it seems obvious that the quality of imperious need belongs to the carnal desire as such. In the same way it seems obvious to the miser that the quality of desirability belongs to gold as such, and not to its exchange value.”

Simone Weil

First and Last Notebooks (1970)

God , People , Way , Parting

“Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.”

Simone Weil

Waiting on God (1950), Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God

Knowledge

“The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 235

Life , Men

“Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Attention and Will (1947), p. 213

Truth

“To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Love (1947), p. 274

Life , Friendship , Art , Joy

“To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore the afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 71

Hope , Soul , Suicide , Affliction

“The struggle between the opponents and defenders of capitalism is a struggle between innovators who do not know what innovation to make and conservatives who do not know what to conserve.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 233

“The aim is to replace economic oligarchies by the State, which has a will-to-power of its own and is quite as little concerned with the public good; and a will-to-power, moreover, which is not economic but military and therefore much more dangerous to any good folk who have a taste for staying alive. And on the bourgeois side what on earth is the sense of objecting to State control in economic affairs if one accepts private monopolies which have all the economic and technical disadvantages of State monopolies and possibly some others as well?”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Power of Words (1937), p. 230

Sense

“Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors, who, when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.”

Simone Weil book The Need for Roots

HTTP://BOOKS. GOOGLE. COM/books? id=zacmeILjLvIC&q=%22culture+as+we+know+it+is+an+instrument+manipulated+by+teachers+for+manufacturing+more+teachers+who+in+their+turn+will+manufacture+still+more+teachers%22&pg=PA65#v=onepage
La culture est un instrument manié par des professeurs pour fabriquer des professeurs qui à leur tour fabriqueront des professeurs.
http://books.google.com/books?id=33rE96fD8h8C&q=%22La+culture+est+un+instrument+mani%C3%A9+par+des+professeurs+pour+fabriquer+des+professeurs+qui+%C3%A0+leur+tour+fabriqueront+des+professeurs%22&pg=PA65#v=onepage
The Need for Roots, part 2: Uprootedness, chapter 1: Uprootedness in the Towns (1949)

“I too have a growing inner certainty that there is a deposit of pure gold in me which ought to be passed on. The trouble is that I am more and more convinced by my experience and observation of my contemporaries that there is no one to receive it.
It's a dense mass. What gets added to it is of a piece with the rest. As the mass grows it becomes more and more dense. I can't parcel it out into little pieces.”

Simone Weil

Letter from Simone Weil to her parents, August 1943, five weeks before her death, quoted in introduction, p. 1
Lectures on Philosophy (1959)

“The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.”

Simone Weil

La force qui tue est une forme sommaire, grossière de la force. Combien plus variée en ses procédés, combien plus surprenante en ses effets, est l'autre force, celle qui ne tue pas; c'est-à-dire celle qui ne tue pas encore.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 155
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

“The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.”

Simone Weil

“The responsibility of writers,” p. 167
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Idea

“I have sometimes told myself that if only there were a notice on church doors forbidding entry to anyone with an income above a certain figure, and a low one, I would be converted at once.”

Simone Weil

Letter to Georges Bernanos (1938), in Seventy Letters, as translated by Richard Rees (Wipf and Stock: 1965), p. 105

“If all men, by the act of being born, are destined to suffer violence, that is a truth to which the empire of circumstances closes their minds.”

Simone Weil

Si tous sont destinés en naissant à souffrir la violence, c'est là une vérité à laquelle l'empire des circonstances ferme les esprits des hommes.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 163
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

Men , Truth , Suffering

“Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.”

Simone Weil

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 55

People , Personality

“The miser deprives himself of his treasure because of his desire for it.”

Simone Weil

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

“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

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 57

Art , Thinking , Personality

“The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul — like pincers to catch hold of God.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 92 (1972 edition)

God , Soul

“I feel ceaselessly and increasingly torn, both in my intelligence and in the depth of my heart, by my inability to conceive simultaneously and in truth of the affliction of humans, the perfection of God, and the relation between the two.”

Simone Weil
God , Truth , Feeling , Intelligence

“The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward 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

"Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God"
Waiting on God (1950)

God , Soul , Study , Heart

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

… It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.
Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Way

“The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection.
This is what Descartes meant when he said: 'I know God before I know myself.'”

Simone Weil

The only mark of God in us is that we feel that we are not God.

p. 90
Lectures on Philosophy (1959)

God