"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"
About this Quote
The intent isn’t to canonize geniuses as saints. It’s almost the opposite: a warning about a kind of moral gossip that mistakes proximity for insight. Weil’s subtext is that modern curiosity often has a leveling impulse. We like our heroes flawed not to understand them, but to domesticate them, to make their excellence feel less demanding. Biography becomes a comfort genre: see, they were messy too, so the work can’t be that serious, and we don’t have to change.
Context matters. Weil wrote under the shadow of war, ideological fanaticism, and mass propaganda, and she was obsessed with “attention” as a spiritual and ethical act. In that light, her line reads like a defense of where a person’s real commitments show up: in the sustained choices that produce a book, a theory, a painting, a political act. Not the curated confession, not the scandal.
It’s also a rebuke to the cult of personality. Greatness, for Weil, isn’t the glow of a life-story; it’s the hard-earned clarity that survives in the work after the ego has been burned away.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Weil, Simone. (2026, January 18). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-write-the-lives-of-the-great-in-separating-16060/
Chicago Style
Weil, Simone. "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." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-write-the-lives-of-the-great-in-separating-16060/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-write-the-lives-of-the-great-in-separating-16060/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2026.
