Daily Inspiration Quote by Simone Weil

Weil doesn’t dress this up as charity, virtue, or even compassion. She calls it an "eternal obligation" - a phrase with the chill of a commandment and the reach of a metaphysical claim. "Eternal" yanks the question out of policy debate and plants it in the realm of the non-negotiable: this duty doesn’t expire when budgets tighten, when strangers feel distant, or when politics get messy. It’s not a mood. It’s law.

The precision is doing moral work. Not "humanity" in the abstract, but "the human being" - singular, embodied, immediate. Weil refuses the comforting distance of statistics. Hunger is not a metaphor here; it’s the simplest proof that a person is being reduced to need. The subtext is indictment: if hunger persists in a world where assistance is possible, the scandal isn’t fate; it’s refusal.

Then she adds the trapdoor: "when one has a chance". Obligation is calibrated to capacity. No heroic self-sacrifice required, no sainthood as an escape clause. If you can, you must. That conditional makes the ethic brutally practical and quietly collectivist: in a modern society, someone almost always has a chance. Institutions, not just individuals, therefore inherit the duty.

Context matters. Weil wrote in a Europe cracking under economic misery and fascist violence; she also lived her philosophy, working factory jobs, starving herself in solidarity, treating attention to suffering as a spiritual discipline. The quote’s power comes from its refusal to let moral life hide behind sentiment. It demands a world where preventing hunger is as basic as refusing to strike someone who can’t defend themselves.