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Murder
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When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
-Simone Weil
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
-Simone Weil
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Obedience
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There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
-Simone Weil
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Oppression
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Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
-Simone Weil
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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.
-Simone Weil
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Pain
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Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
-Simone Weil
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There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
-Simone Weil
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Paradise, Utopia
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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
-Simone Weil
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Past, the
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The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
-Simone Weil
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Philosophy
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The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
-Simone Weil
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Poverty
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As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.
-Simone Weil, letter written in Marseilles, France to her close friend Father Perrin, May 15, 1942
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Power
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Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
-Simone Weil
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The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
-Simone Weil
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To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
-Simone Weil
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Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
-Simone Weil
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Principles
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A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
-Simone Weil
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Problems
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When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
-Simone Weil
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Punishment
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Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
-Simone Weil
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Purity
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Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
-Simone Weil
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Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
-Simone Weil
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Reality
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Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
-Simone Weil
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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.
-Simone Weil
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Religion
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In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
-Simone Weil
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Right, Rightness
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One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
-Simone Weil
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Sadness
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With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.
-Simone Weil
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Books by and about Simone Weil