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Simone Weil

French philosopher (1909-1943)

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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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Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

– Simone Weil

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Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

– Simone Weil

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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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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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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

– Simone Weil

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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.

– Simone Weil

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To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

– Simone Weil

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Most idealistic people are skint. I have discovered that people with money have no imagination, and people with imagination have no money.

– Simone Weil

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A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.

– Simone Weil

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Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.”

– Simone Weil

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A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”

– Simone Weil

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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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All sins are attempts to fill voids.

– Simone Weil

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And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.' To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so.”

– Simone Weil

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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

– Simone Weil

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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

– Simone Weil

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Bourgeois society is infected by monomania the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

– Simone Weil

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Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

– Simone Weil

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Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

– Simone Weil

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Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

– Simone Weil

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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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History is a tissue of base and cruel acts in the midst of which a few drops of purity sparkle at long intervals.

– Simone Weil

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Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our life.

– Simone Weil

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Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

– Simone Weil

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It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.”

– Simone Weil

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Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.”

– Simone Weil

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Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think of himself as a limited and dependent being and only suffering teaches him this.

– Simone Weil

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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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The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It too is something like a sacrament.

– Simone Weil

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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through

– Simone Weil

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There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

– Simone Weil

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Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.”

– Simone Weil

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Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.”

– Simone Weil

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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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When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous.

– Simone Weil

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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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David DeBus
These treasures show the priceless contributions of a saintly 20th century theologian and original.
David DeBus
LikeReply6 years ago

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