Daily Inspiration Quote by Simone Weil

Power, Weil insists, is not a tool you pick up; it is a current that runs through you and rewires you. Her line has the hard, unsentimental clarity of someone who watched ideology turn human bodies into raw material. Writing in the shadow of fascism and war, Weil isn’t offering a moral fable about “corruption.” She’s describing a mechanism: force doesn’t merely harm; it changes the conditions of perception for everyone near it.

The brilliance is in the symmetry. To the victim, force is obvious: it crushes. To the wielder, its violence is quieter, internal, and therefore easier to justify: it intoxicates. Intoxication names the seduction of certainty, the feeling that you are finally outside ordinary limits, that rules apply to others. It’s also a warning about self-deception. The man who “possesses it, or thinks he does” is already sliding into fantasy, mistaking temporary leverage for mastery.

Then Weil lands the counterpunch: “nobody really possesses it.” Force is portrayed as autonomous, almost impersonal, moving from hand to hand, consuming the agency of its owner as surely as it destroys the agency of its target. Subtext: the conqueror is not the author of events so much as the next body recruited by a system of coercion - bureaucracy, weapons, crowds, revenge - that outlasts individual intentions.

In an age that romanticizes “power” as empowerment, Weil offers a colder diagnosis: force doesn’t elevate the self. It evacuates it.