Simone Weil

“As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.”

“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing is less instructive than a machine.”

“If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.”

“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.”

“If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.”

“In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.”

“There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.”

“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.”

“To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.”

“A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.”

“I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.”

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”

“It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.”

“Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.”