“During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance … has seeped down into the lowest publications. … Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature’s spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests.”

—  Simone Weil

“Morality and literature,” p. 164
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

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French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist 1909–1943

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