“The first thinker was, without a doubt, the first man obsessed by why. An unaccustomed mania, not at all contagious: rare indeed are those who suffer from it, who are a prey to questioning, and who can accept no given because they were born in consternation.”

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

Interview in 1957

Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), p. 219: quote in 1898

Amanda Collier Ridley, Chapter 7, p. 137
2009, The Best of Me (2011)

Source: On Liberty

Source: Darkness Visible (1990), III
Context: This general unawareness of what depression is really like was apparent most recently in the matter of Primo Levi, the remarkable Italian writer and survivor of Auschwitz who, at the age of sixty-seven, hurled himself down a stairwell in Turin in 1987. Since my own involvement with the illness, I had been more than ordinarily interested in Levi’s death, and so, late in 1988, when I read an account in The New York Times about a symposium on the writer and his work held at New York University, I was fascinated but, finally, appalled. For, according to the article, many of the participants, worldly writers and scholars, seemed mystified by Levi’s suicide, mystified and disappointed. It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis — a man of exemplary resilience and courage — had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept. In the face of a terrible absolute — self-destruction — their reaction was helplessness and (the reader could not avoid it) a touch of shame.
My annoyance over all this was so intense that I was prompted to write a short piece for the op-ed page of the Times. The argument I put forth was fairly straightforward: the pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. Through the healing process of time — and through medical intervention or hospitalization in many cases — most people survive depression, which may be its only blessing; but to the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

Source: Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics (1948)

Le prestige, qui constitue la force plus qu'aux trois quarts, est fait avant tout de la superbe indifférence du fort pour les faibles, indifférence si contagieuse qu'elle se communique à ceux qui en sont l'objet.
in The Simone Weil Reader, p. 168
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941)

Drawn and Quartered (1983)