Selected Simone Weil Quotations
• I can, therefore I am.
• To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
• Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
• It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
• The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
• If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
• Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
• 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.
• The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.
• A hateful act is the transference to others of the degradation we bear in ourselves.
• Fire destroys that which feeds it.
• The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
• At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done.
• To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
• 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.
• 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.
• When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.
• 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.
• 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.
• There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.
• Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
• The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
• The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
More Women's Quotes:
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