Simone Weil

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”

“To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.”

“Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.”

“We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.”

“Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.”

“Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.”

“If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.”

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

“Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.”

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

“Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.”

“To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.”

“More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”

“I can, therefore I am.”

“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”

“I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.”

“It is to the prodigals...that the memory of their Father's house comes back. If the son had lived economically he would never have thought of returning.”

“Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.”

“A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.”

“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.”