Simone Weil Quotes

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

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

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

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

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

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

Pain is the root of knowledge.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life.

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.

The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.

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

I can, therefore I am.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

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.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

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.

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.

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.