Love Quote by Simone Weil

A slap of cold water disguised as a piety word. Weil takes "charity" and strips it of its Hallmark glow, insisting it isn’t affection for people as impressive, lovable, or useful - but love precisely where the usual reasons for loving collapse. "In so far as they are nothing" is not contempt; it’s an assault on the ego’s accounting system. Most love, even when sincere, is transactional: we love the parts of others that flatter our values, confirm our identity, or promise return. Weil calls that bluff. Charity begins when the person in front of you can’t be turned into a mirror.

The theological sting is the comparison to God. God, in Weil’s Christian-Platonic imagination, is perfect attention without need. To love "as God does" is to practice a love unmoored from appetite - not hunger, not sentimentality, not the need to feel like a good person. That’s why the phrase "nothing" matters: it pushes love into the zone where power, status, and narrative fall away. You can’t love someone’s resume as God does; you can only love their naked existence.

Context sharpens the severity. Weil wrote amid the moral wreckage of the 1930s and World War II, obsessed with "affliction" (malheur) - the kind of suffering that pulverizes identity and social recognition. Her charity is built for the crushed, the invisible, the humiliated. It’s also an ethical dare aimed at the comfortable: if your love requires someone to be someone, you’re not loving them; you’re loving your own reasons.