Simone Weil Quotes

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

“238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.”
― Simone Weil

“Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Man's great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“There are two forms of friendship: meeting and separation. They are indissoluble. Both of them contain some good, and this good of friendship is unique, for when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation. As both forms contain the same good thing, they are both equally good.”
― Simone Weil

“Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.”
― Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“It is not enough to have perceived such a notion, given it one’s attention, understood it; it must be given a permanent place in the mind, so that it may be present even when one’s attention is directed toward something else.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“J'éprouve un déchirement qui s'aggrave sans cesse, à la fois dan l'intelligence et au centre du coeur, par l'incapacité où je suis de penser ensemble dans la vérité le malheur des hommes, la perfection de Dieu et le lien entre les deux.

'I feel ceaselessly and increasingly torn, both in my intelligence and in the depth of my heart, by my inability to conceive simultaneously and in truth of the affliction of humans, the perfection of God, and the relation between the two.'

Simone Weil, Lettre à Maurice Schumann, n.d. (prb Dec. 1942)”
― Simone Weil, Seventy Letters: Personal and Intellectual Windows on a Thinker

“In general the relative value of the various religions is a very difficult thing to discern; it is almost impossible, perhaps quite impossible. For a religion is known only from inside.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“It sometimes happens that a thought, either formulated to oneself or not formulated at all, works secretly on the mind and yet has but little direct influence over it.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature, which infinitely exceed him when in inaction; there is only equilibrium in action by which man recreates his own life through work.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless.”
― simone weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“If the middle classes haven’t the same need of an apocalypse, it is because long rows of figures have a poetry, a prestige which tempers in some sort the boredom associated with money; whereas, when money is counted in sixpences, we have boredom in its pure, unadulterated state. Nevertheless, that taste shown by bourgeois, both great and small, for Fascism, indicates that, in spite of everything, they too can feel bored.”
― Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind

“Just as we build a house or a cathedral with the same kind of stone, so we may use the same common and homely metaphors and images to convey truths on widely separated planes of discourse. ...And the highest is often best conveyed in terms of the lowest... In exploring the highest reaches of experience, we need a language as fresh and living as the truths with which we are in contact. For most mystics, this is the language of nerve tips.

E.W.F. Tomlin on Simone Weil's use of language.”
― E.W.F. Tomlin

“We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer.”
― Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

“Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.”
― Simone Weil