169 quotes
Monotony of evil: never anything new, everything about it is equivalent. ... It is because of this monotony that quantity plays so great a part. A host of women (Don Juan) or of men (Célimène), etc.
Gravity and Grace (1972)
To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
Waiting on God (1950)
If a man has willfully refused to consent, then it is in itself a criminal activity for him to exercise any function, major or minor, public or private, which gives him control over people's lives.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of religious life, it has been continuously used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people.
Psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.
If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
The might which kills outright is an elementary and coarse form of might. How much more varied in its devices; how much more astonishing in its effects is that other which does not kill; or which delays killing.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
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 much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
The prestige which constitutes three-fourths of might is first of all made up of that superb indifference which the powerful have for the weak, an indifference so contagious that it is communicated even to those who are its object.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
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?
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
No combination of circumstances ever cancels this obligation. If there are circumstances which seem to cancel it as regards a certain man or category of men, they impose it in fact all the more imperatively.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad, the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
"A man thinks he is dying for his country," said Anatole France, "but he is dying for a few industrialists." But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the "chosen people".
Letter to a Priest (1951)
Although people seem to be unaware of it today, the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
Waiting on God (1950)
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.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
It is the aim of public life to arrange that all forms of power are entrusted, so far as possible, to men who effectively consent to be bound by the obligation towards all human beings which lies upon everyone, and who understand the obligation.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)
Just as a vagrant accused of stealing a carrot from a field stands before a comfortably seated judge who keeps up an elegant flow of queries, comments and witticisms while the accused is unable to stammer a word, so truth stands before an intelligence which is concerned with the elegant manipulation of opinions.
Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986)
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.
Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943)