Society is the cave. The way out is solitude. - Simone Weil

Beauty is the supreme mystery of this world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. Beauty always promises, but never gives anything; it stimulates hunger but has no nourishment for the part of the soul which looks in this world for sustenance. It feeds only the part of the soul that gazes. While exciting desire, it makes clear there is nothing in it to be desired, because the one thing we want is that it should not change. If one does not seek means to evade the exquisite anguish it inflicts, then desire is gradually transformed into love; and one begins to acquire the faculty of pure and disinterested attention.

One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.

Let us not think that because we are less brutal, less violent, less inhuman than our opponents we will carry the day. Brutality, violence and inhumanity have an immense prestige that schoolbooks hide from children, that grown men do not admit, but that everybody bows before. For the opposite virtues to have as much prestige, they must be actively and constantly put into practice. Anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent and as inhuman as someone else but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in such a confrontation.”1

Simone Weil