Simone Weil
Philosopher
1909-02-03 – 1943-08-24
Simone Weil was a French philosopher, political thinker, and mystic known for work on ethics, labor, and spirituality. Her writings include Gravity and Grace and The Need for Roots.
Books by Simone Weil
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The Notebooks of Simone Weil
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Simone Weil, an Anthology
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Quotes by Simone Weil
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A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.
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Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution.
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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.
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Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
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Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
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Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it.
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Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
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Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).
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To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.
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In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
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Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.
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When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.
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He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
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We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.
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There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
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We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, "I am suffering," than to say, —This landscape is ugly.
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At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.
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All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
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At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.
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Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it.
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