Liz Mackinlay > Liz's Quotes

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“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.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”
― Simone Weil

“I can, therefore I am.”
― Simone Weil

“Humility is attentive patience.”
― Simone Weil

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”
― Simone Weil

“You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.”
― Iris Murdoch

“The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know. ”
― Simone Weil

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is to running.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
― Simone Weil