Inspiring Quotes by Simone Weil - Page 2

Click here to get back to Simone Weil

"As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles"

"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God"

"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines"

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams"

"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war"

"Every perfect life is a parable invented by God"

"Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings"

"Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him"

"Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers"

"Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does"

"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything"

"Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link"

"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves"

"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"

"Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty"

"I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded"

Page 2 of 2