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)
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.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)
“No, men are not born to know, but they are destined for it.”
The Art of Magic (1891)
Context: No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural. They come rather as a guessing committee, to spy out the methods with which he mystifies. Hundreds of eyes are upon him. Men with more knowledge of the sciences than he come to trip and expose him, and to baffle their scrutiny is the study of his life. Long years of training and exercise alone will not make a magician. … There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature. To these qualifications he must add the rather incongruous quality of a mind turning on contradictions. With a scientific cause he must produce a seemingly opposite effect to that warranted by order and system.
I know of no life requiring such a series of opposite qualities as the magician's. And after the exercise of all these qualities I have named, resulting in the production of the most startling and novel results, the magician has not the satisfaction, like other men, of the enjoyment of his own product. He must be prepared to see it copied by others, or after a short time discovered by the public.
Of mathematics — as quoted in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980) by Morris Kline, p. 99.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1963337,00.html
The Guardian, 4 December 2006, When it comes to psychics, my stance is hardcore: they must die alone in windowless cells http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1963337,00.html
Guardian columns
June 20, 1944. Quoted in "Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce" - Page 131 - by Ray Moseley - History - 2004.
Quoted in: Chalmers Izett Paton (1872) Freemasonry and its jurisprudence, p. 56.
“The extremist world view is the gateway, and violence is the ultimate destination.”
2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)
The Uttarpara Address (1909)
Context: That which we call the Hindu religion is really the eternal religion, because it is the universal religion which embraces all others. If a religion is not universal, it cannot be eternal. A narrow religion, a sectarian religion, an exclusive religion can live only for a limited time and a limited purpose. This is the one religion that can triumph over materialism by including and anticipating the discoveries of science and the speculations of philosophy. It is the one religion which impresses on mankind the closeness of God to us and embraces in its compass all the possible means by which man can approach God. It is the one religion which insists every moment on the truth which all religions acknowledge that He is in all men and all things and that in Him we move and have our being. It is the one religion which enables us not only to understand and believe this truth but to realise it with every part of our being. It is the one religion which shows the world what the world is, that it is the Lila of Vasudeva. It is the one religion which shows us how we can best play our part in that Lila, its subtlest laws and its noblest rules. It is the one religion which does not separate life in any smallest detail from religion, which knows what immortality is and has utterly removed from us the reality of death.
Essays and Dialogues (1882), Dialogue between Nature and an Icelander
