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

Simone Weil

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Simone Weil
Age: 34 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 3
Died: 1943
Died: August 24
Autobiographer
Diarist
French Resistance Fighter
Philosopher
Poet
Teacher
Trade Unionist
Translator
Writer
Paris
France
Simone Adolphine Weil
Art
Gratuitous
Great
Afforded
Life
Joys
Like
Fault
Faults
Friendship
Ought
Joy

More quotes by Simone Weil

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Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.
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The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
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Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
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What is surprising is not that oppression should make its appearance only after higher forms of economy have been reached, but that it should always accompany them.
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What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
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Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
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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.
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An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
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Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
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The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.
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The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
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At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.
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Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.
Simone Weil
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The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
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Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.
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It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.
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In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.
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The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
Simone Weil
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If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
Simone Weil