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Sadness
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Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
-Simone Weil
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Satisfaction
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If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
-Simone Weil
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Science
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To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century; without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.
-Simone Weil
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Serenity
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In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
-Simone Weil
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Slavery
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We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits -- and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
-Simone Weil
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Solitude
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In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.
-Simone Weil
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Soul
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
-Simone Weil
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State
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Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
-Simone Weil
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Suffering
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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.
-Simone Weil
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Sympathy
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The capacity to give one's attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
-Simone Weil
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Truth
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In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself -- only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.
-Simone Weil
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Tyranny
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The real stumbling-block of totalitarian r?gimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.
-Simone Weil
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War
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A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
-Simone Weil
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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.
-Simone Weil
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Work
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The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
-Simone Weil
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Books by and about Simone Weil