Simone Weil Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
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I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
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It is not enough that France should be regarded as a country which enjoys the remains of a freedom acquired long ago. If she is still to count in the world--and if she does not intend to, she may as well perish--she must be seen by her own citizens and by all men as an ever-flowing source of liberty. There must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France.
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One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
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Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
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An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
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A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
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Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
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How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
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Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
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Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
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A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.
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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 the capacity do not possess it.
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I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
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Modern life is given over to immoderation. Immoderation invades everything: actions and thought, public and private life.
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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.
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The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
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The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people.
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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?
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The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
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Official history is believing the murderers at their word.
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God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it.
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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.
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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.
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One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.
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The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who coordinate.
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Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.
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