Authors
Simone Weil Quotes
Best Quotes by Simone Weil (Top 10)
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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Simone Weil -
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
Simone Weil -
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
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Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatusthe bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
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We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
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Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.
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If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
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Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
Simone Weil
More Simone Weil Quotes
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Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
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There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
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The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?
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Humility is attentive patience.
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A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
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Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
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A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
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Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
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The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
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The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
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Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
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Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
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One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
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Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.
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To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
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A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.
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Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
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Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
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Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.
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When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
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The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
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The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
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Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
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To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
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The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
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Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Simone Weil