Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 69
Context: If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood. In them, intelligence is neither a good, nor even an asset. The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
Article, Evening Standard, Tue 25 June 2013, pp.1-4
“Mind is a captive of the body.”
Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 17
As quoted in Exclusive: Dennis Nilsen: My Prison Life of Drink and Drugs http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/exclusive-dennis-nilsen-prison-life-555104, Mirror.co.uk (27 August, 2005)
“To minds of a certain cast there is nothing so captivating as simplification and generalization.”
Book I, Introduction, p. 5
Principles of Political Economy (Second Edition 1836)
“Truth is an antidote against error. Error is the adultery of the mind.”
Heaven Taken By Storm
“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”
1930s, Address to the Governing Board of the Pan American Union (1939)
Context: There is no fatality which forces the Old World towards new catastrophe. Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds. They have within themselves the power to become free at any moment.
