Top 15 Simone Weil Quotes

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

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

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

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

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus — the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.

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

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.

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.