He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor lo… - Simone Weil

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He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.

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About Simone Weil

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.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Simone Adolphine Weil
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Additional quotes by Simone Weil

Those who keep the masses of men in subjection by exercising force and cruelty deprive them at once of two vital foods, liberty and obedience; for it is no longer within the power of such masses to accord their inner consent to the authority to which they are subjected. Those who encourage a state of things in which the hope of gain is the principal motive take away from men their obedience, for consent which is its essence is not something which can be sold.

There are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. … It is the same with pure good; for a necessity as strong as gravity condemns man to evil and forbids him any good, or only within the narrowest limits and laboriously obtained and soiled and adulterated with evil. … The simplicity which makes the fictional good something insipid and unable to hold the attention becomes, in the real good, an unfathomable marvel.

One could count on one's fingers the number of scientists in the entire world who have a general idea of the history and development of their own particular science; there is not one who is really competent as regards sciences other than his own. As science forms an indivisible whole, one may say that there are no longer, strictly speaking, any scientists, but only drudges doing scientific work. . . .

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