Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters. - Simone Weil

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

If one were to entrust the organisation of public life to the devil, he could not invent a more clever device.

It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.