Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
Context: In politics nothing is immutable. Events carry within them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them and direct them.
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
On Dramatic Poetry (1758)
“The highest triumph of Bismarckian politics carried its downfall and bankruptcy within it.”
No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)
“… the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love”
Variant: I became aware that the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.
Source: Memories of My Melancholy Whores
As quoted in Michel Foucault (1991) by Didier Eribon, as translated by Betsy Wind, Harvard University Press, p. 282
Context: There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Attention and Will (1947), p. 216
The Art of Peace (1992)
Variant: The Art of Peace is invincible because it contends with nothing.
Context: There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.
“I carry the seeds of death within me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love.”
Source: Speaker for the Dead
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 156.
