Quotes by Simone Weil

Simone Weil (1909–1943) — Philosophin · keine · Frankreich

Simone Weil war eine französische Philosophin, Sozialaktivistin und christliche Mystikerin, die in den 1930er-Jahren in Frankreich und zuletzt im Londoner Exil wirkte. Sie steht für ein Denken der radikalen Selbstentäußerung, des Mitleidens und der ungeteilten Aufmerksamkeit, während ihre polemische Ablehnung des Alten Testaments und des Judentums bis heute scharf kritisiert wird. Heutigen Bibellesern begegnet sie als Grenzgängerin, die Fragen nach Kreuz, Gnade und menschlichem Unglück mit existenziellem Ernst außerhalb kirchlicher Dogmatik durchdringt.

Era: The 20th Century

Recurring topics: Ethical Questions, Wisdom & Understanding, Meaning & Identity, Justice & Commitment, Love, Freedom & Truth, Suffering & the Question of God, Humility & Pride

Quotes by Simone Weil

Attention, at its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Simone Weil

Love is not consolation, it is light.
Simone Weil

To love a stranger as oneself implies as its counterpart: to love oneself as a stranger.
Simone Weil

The word revolution is a word for which one kills, for which one dies, for which one sends the popular masses to their death, but which has no content whatsoever.
Simone Weil

There is no choice of remedies. There is only one. Only one thing makes monotony bearable: a light of eternity; it is beauty.
Simone Weil

Among human beings, one fully recognizes the existence only of those one loves.
Simone Weil

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between oneself and what one loves.
Simone Weil

Knowledge of human misery is difficult for the rich, for the powerful, because they are almost invincibly led to believe that they are something.
Simone Weil

The enlightened goodwill of men acting as individuals is the only possible principle of social progress.
Simone Weil

Things play the role of men, men play the role of things; that is the root of evil.
Simone Weil

Affliction compels one to recognize as real what one does not believe possible.
Simone Weil

We know by means of the intelligence that what the intelligence does not grasp is more real than what it grasps.
Simone Weil

Never under any circumstances will I consent to judge suitable for one of my fellow beings, whoever he may be, what I judge morally intolerable for myself.
Simone Weil

Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity.
Simone Weil

God can only be present in creation in the form of absence.
Simone Weil

Democracy, the power of the majority, are not goods. They are means toward the good, deemed effective rightly or wrongly.
Simone Weil

Parties are organisms publicly, officially constituted in such a way as to kill in souls the sense of truth and justice.
Simone Weil

A criterion of the real is that it is hard and rough. One finds joys in it, not pleasantness. What is pleasant is daydreaming.
Simone Weil

It is a great danger to love God as a gambler loves the game.
Simone Weil

Try to remedy faults through attention and not through the will.
Simone Weil

Since that day, I am ashamed of my country. Since that day, I cannot meet an Indochinese, an Algerian, a Moroccan, without wanting to ask his forgiveness.
Simone Weil

Love is a sign of our misery. God can only love Himself. We can only love something else.
Simone Weil

A man who were alone in the universe would have no rights, but only obligations.
Simone Weil

I must not love my suffering because it is useful, but because it is.
Simone Weil

Always consider men in power as dangerous things.
Simone Weil

The beautiful is the necessary, which, while remaining conformable to its own law and to it alone, obeys the good.
Simone Weil

I would gladly propose this postulate: one is always barbarous towards the weak.
Simone Weil

All quotes · lumen.bible