Franca Cavallini > Franca's Quotes

“Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”
― Simone Weil

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
― Simone Weil

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

“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.”
― Simone Weil

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”
― Simone Weil

“Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it. ”
― Simone Weil

“One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.”
― Simone Weil

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

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

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. ”
― Simone Weil

“A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless. ”
― Simone Weil

“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”
― Simone Weil

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty. ”
― Simone Weil

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― Simone Weil

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

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― Simone Weil

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity. ”
― Simone Weil

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.”
― Simone Weil

“Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.”
― Simone Weil

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”
― Simone Weil

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
― Simone Weil

“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.”
― Simone Weil

“Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their time comes, will manufacture professors. ”
― Simone Weil

“Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.”
― Simone Weil

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

“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.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace