Simone Weil Quotes

• Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reality

• Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human Beings

• To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hero, Choice, Choosing

• The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Friendship, Love

  Tags in Community

• Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fiction, Imagination

• The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have the capacity do not possess it.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Suffering

  Tags in Empathy, Attention

• Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Suffering

  Tags in Empathy, Attention

• The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Education

  Tags in Learning

• In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Country, Democracy

  Tags in Peace

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Friends

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in War

• Learn to reject friendship, or rather the dream of friendship. To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art, or life (like aesthetic joys). I must refuse it in order to be worthy to receive it.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Friendship

• The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Love

• The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

  Simone Weil

  Tags in Denger

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Tags in Equality

• Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Intelligence

• Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in History

• The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Future

• Obvious and inexorable oppression that cannot be overcome does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

  Simone Weil

  Tags in Injustice

• Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Friendship

  Tags in Integrity/Individuality, Solitude

Simone Weil (101)

Birth:	3rd February, 1909
Death:	24th August, 1943
Nationality:	French
Profession:	Philosopher

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