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Simone Weil Quotes


Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.

Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

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.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

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

The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.