Simone Weil Quotes

Simone Weil (89)

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

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Births

• 1917 - Raymond Burr
• 1780 - Elizabeth Fry
• 1942 - David Hunt
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• The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Man

• Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we don’t happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we don’t understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Intelligence

  Tags in Limits

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Degree

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Intelligence

• There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Power

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Genius

  Tags in Virtue

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hope, Socialism

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Teaching, Important

• Humility is attentive patience.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Humility, Patience

• Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Spread, Story

• When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Class

• When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Contradiction

• With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human Being

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Truth

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Faith

• The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Attention

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

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Skepticism

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, Lives

• We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Hell, Paradise

• To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

  Simone Weil

  Topics in Power