Simone Weil quotes - page 10

To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled - that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist. (Simone Weil)
Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong. View quote
Simone Weil
My purpose here is to denounce an idea which seems to be dangerous and false. View quote
Simone Weil
Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at. View quote
Simone Weil
The love of these things that are outside visible Christianity keeps me outside the Church... But it also seems to me that when one speaks to you of unbelievers who are in affliction and accept their affliction as a part of the order of the world, it does not impress you in the same way as if it were a question of Christians and of submission to the will of God. Yet it is the same thing. View quote
Simone Weil
This reintegration with the good is what punishment is. Every man who is innocent, or who has finally expiated guilt, needs to be recognized as honourable to the same extent as anyone else. View quote
Simone Weil
It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. View quote
Simone Weil
The reality of this world is necessity. The part of man which is in this world is the part which is in bondage to necessity and subject to the misery of need. View quote
Simone Weil
The proportions of good and evil in any society depend partly upon the proportion of consent to that of refusal and partly upon the distribution of power between those who consent and those who refuse. View quote
Simone Weil
The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. View quote
Simone Weil
Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. (Simone Weil)
It would be strange, indeed, that the word of Christ should have produced such results if it had been properly understood. View quote
Simone Weil
Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. View quote
Simone Weil
Humanity cannot progress by importing into theoretical study the processes of blind routine and haphazard experiment by which production has so long been dominated. ... The true relation between theory and application only appears when theoretical research has been purged of all empiricism. View quote
Simone Weil
Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue). View quote
Simone Weil
The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value. View quote
Simone Weil
Words like virtue, nobility, honor, honesty, generosity, have become almost impossible to use or else they have acquired bastard meanings; language is no longer equipped for legitimately praising a man's character. View quote
Simone Weil
Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime. View quote
Simone Weil
Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits. View quote
Simone Weil
Although it is beyond the reach of any human faculties, man has the power of turning his attention and love towards it. Nothing can ever justify the assumption that any man, whoever he may be, has been deprived of this power. It is a power which is only real in this world in so far as it is exercised. The sole condition for exercising it is consent. View quote
Simone Weil
The collective is the object of all idolatry, this it is which chains us to the earth. (Simone Weil)
If the countries were divided by a real opposition of interests, it would be possible to arrive at a satisfactory compromise. But when economic and political interests have no meaning apart from war, how can they be peacefully reconciled? View quote
Simone Weil
Men are unequal in all their relations with the things of this world, without exception. The only thing that is identical in all men is the presence of a link with the reality outside the world. View quote
Simone Weil
Anyone whose attention and love are really directed towards the reality outside the world recognizes at the same time that he is bound, both in public and private life, by the single and permanent obligation to remedy, according to his responsibilities and to the extent of his power, all the privations of soul and body which are liable to destroy or damage the earthly life of any human being whatsoever. View quote
Simone Weil
In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes. View quote
Simone Weil