Simone Weil Quotes

French philosopher, writer, and social activist (1909–1943)

Add quote

Simone Adolphine Weil (3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French social and religious philosopher, and Christian mystic. Politically active, during the Spanish Civil War she joined the Anarchist military unit known as the Durruti Column, and took part in the French Resistance during World War II. She was the sister of mathematician André Weil, with whom she shared an interest in ancient Greek and Indian thought.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Émile Novis • S. Galois

Alternative Names: Simone Adolphine Weil

From Wikidata (CC0)

We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.

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.

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

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.

True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

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

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

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

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

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.

I can, therefore I am.