110+ Simone Weil Quotes On God, Attention And Suffering

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. She is best known for her social and political thought, as well as her writings on mysticism, religion, and ethics. Weil was a strong advocate of social justice and her work was heavily influenced by her Christian faith and her belief in personal responsibility. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Simone Weil on god, love, attention.

Top 10 Simone Weil Quotes

1. Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
2. We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
3. Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.
4. There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
5. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change.
6. If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.
7. A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
8. There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.
9. The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running.
10. Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

Simone Weil Image Quotes

The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. — Simone Weil

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

Simone Weil Short Quotes

• Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
• Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
• To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
• Whenever one tries to suppress doubt , there is tyranny .
• The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.
• The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
• To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
• Patriotism is idolatry of the self.
• Science is voiceless; it is the scientists who talk.
• One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

Simone Weil Quotes About God

Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego. — Simone Weil

Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication. — Simone Weil

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God. — Simone Weil

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link. — Simone Weil

Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does. — Simone Weil

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude. — Simone Weil

We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him. — Simone Weil

We can only know one thing about God -- that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him. — Simone Weil

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. — Simone Weil

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Love

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

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. — Simone Weil

Love is not consolation, it is light. — Simone Weil

Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being. — Simone Weil

Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty. — Simone Weil

The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love. — Simone Weil

Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food. — Simone Weil

God's love for us is not the reason for which we should love him. God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves. — Simone Weil

The children of God should not have any other country here below but the universe itself, with the totality of all the reasoning creatures it ever has contained, contains, or ever will contain. That is the native city to which we owe our love. — Simone Weil

School children and students who love God should never say: "For my part I like mathematics"; "I like French"; "I like Greek." They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Attention

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. — Simone Weil

Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. — Simone Weil

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest. — Simone Weil

Attentiveness is the heart of prayer. — Simone Weil

Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. — Simone Weil

Humility is attentive patience. — Simone Weil

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention. — Simone Weil

prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it. — Simone Weil

The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies. — Simone Weil

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

Simone Weil Quotes About Suffering

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

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. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

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

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 — Simone Weil

A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again — Simone Weil

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

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 — Simone Weil

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her. — Simone Weil

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 the capacity do not possess it. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Spiritual

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

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work. — Simone Weil

We cannot take a single step toward heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. — Simone Weil

It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. Until then, whatever he may do, the social is transcendent in relation to him. — Simone Weil

There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness. — Simone Weil

Expectant waiting is the foundation of the spiritual life. — Simone Weil

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

[We are not] to take one step, even in the direction of what is good, beyond that to which we are irresistibly impelled by God, and this applies to action, word, and thought. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Life

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

The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell. — Simone Weil

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

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it. — Simone Weil

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

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life. — Simone Weil

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure. — Simone Weil

I can, therefore I am. — Simone Weil

Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life. — Simone Weil

Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Real

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. — Simone Weil

The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade. — Simone Weil

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise. — Simone Weil

The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence. — Simone Weil

The real sin of idolatry is always committed on behalf of something similar to the State. — Simone Weil

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

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real. — Simone Weil

The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Truth

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace. — Simone Weil

Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others. — Simone Weil

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation. — Simone Weil

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

The need of truth is more sacred than any other need. — Simone Weil

Truth is one, but error is manifold. — Simone Weil

Contradiction itself, far from always being a criterion of error, is sometimes a sign of truth. — Simone Weil

It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it. — Simone Weil

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Quotes About Reality

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached. — Simone Weil

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. — Simone Weil

Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false? — Simone Weil

In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil. — Simone Weil

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. — Simone Weil

Joy is being fully aware of reality. — Simone Weil

Simone Weil Famous Quotes And Sayings

The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic. — Simone Weil

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

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The destruction of Troy. The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence - that is beautiful. — Simone Weil

Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. — Simone Weil

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

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. — Simone Weil

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

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell. — Simone Weil

Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible. — Simone Weil

Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn. — Simone Weil

Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity. — Simone Weil

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

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish. — Simone Weil

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world. — Simone Weil

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

Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself. — Simone Weil

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission. — Simone Weil

It is grace that forms the void inside us and it is grace that can fill the void. — Simone Weil

The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something. — Simone Weil

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith ; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong. — Simone Weil

All sins are attempts to fill voids. — Simone Weil

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

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

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything. — Simone Weil

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge. — Simone Weil

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity. — Simone Weil

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'. — Simone Weil

Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith. — Simone Weil

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war. — Simone Weil

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know. — Simone Weil

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny. — Simone Weil

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world. — Simone Weil

When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door. — Simone Weil

It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. — Simone Weil

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities. — Simone Weil

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. — Simone Weil

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement. — Simone Weil

The future is made of the same stuff as the present. — Simone Weil

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. — Simone Weil

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

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

Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy. — Simone Weil

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat. — Simone Weil

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

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people. — Simone Weil

The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such. — Simone Weil

Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. — Simone Weil

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it. — Simone Weil

How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts? — Simone Weil

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves. — Simone Weil

We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. — Simone Weil

The villagers seldom leave the village; many scientists have limited and poorly cultivated minds apart from their specialty. — Simone Weil

Life Lessons by Simone Weil

1. Simone Weil believed that true freedom comes from living a life of self-discipline and self-sacrifice, and that true happiness comes from a life of service to others.
2. She also emphasized the importance of cultivating a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the beauty and goodness in the world.
3. Finally, Weil believed that true wisdom and understanding can only be achieved through a life of contemplation and reflection.