“Your dæmon can only live its full life in the world it was born in. Elsewhere it will eventually sicken and die.”

Last Act in Palmyra

Donna Giovanna, Act IV, scene iii.

Source: Assata: An Autobiography

"Variations," lines 31-33
Blood for a Stranger (1942)

"Variations," lines 31-33
Blood for a Stranger (1942)

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.

Journal entry (November 1951) as published in the Kerouac ROMnibus http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/resguide/resources/j100.html

1940s, Third Inaugural Address (1941)
Context: Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.

Variant: Live full, die empty