Quotes by
Simone Weil |
1909-1943 , French philosopher
French mystic, social philosopher, and activist in the French Resistance during World War II, whose posthumously published works had particular influence on French and English social thought. | 29 quotes | 493 visits |
Quotations
| • | Beauty tricks the flesh to get permission to reach the soul. 3 |
| • | All sins are attempts to fill the emptiness. 2 |
| • | Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. 2 |
| • | One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights. 2 |
| • | If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money. 1 |
| • | When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door. 1 |
| • | The Gospels are the last and most wonderful expression of Greek genius, as the Iliad was its first expression. 1 |
| • | We only know one thing about God: He is what we are not. 1 |
| • | The Christian is a bad pagan, converted by a bad Jew. |
| • | Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. |
| • | Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on. |
| • | To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. |
| • | Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny . |
| • | It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves. |
| • | All the tragedies which we can imagine return in the end to the one and only tragedy: the passage of time. |
| • | Power... is the supreme end for all those who have not understood. |
| • | Evil when we are under its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. |
| • | The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it. |
| • | Fire destroys that which feeds it. |
| • | Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity. |
| • | It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people. |
| • | Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. |
| • | A mind enclosed in language is in prison. |
| • | The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it. |
| • | In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time. |
| • | True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world. |
| • | Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. |
| • | The word “revolution” is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the masses of the workers to death, but which ultimately has no meaning. |
| • | The spiritual meaning of Christianity is complete with the death of Christ on the cross; there was no need for the icing on the cake which is the Resurrection. |
