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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.

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
Paradise
Prefer
Hell
Must
Real
Preference
Imaginary

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Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
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The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
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Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
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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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I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
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Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
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Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
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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.
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We do injury to a child if we bring it up in a narrow Christianity, which prevents it from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of purest gold to be found in non-Christian civilizations. Laical education does an even greater injury to children. It covers up those treasures, and those of Christianity as well.
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When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
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A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.
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I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
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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.
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The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.
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Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.
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The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
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The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
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The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.
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School children and students who love God should never say: For my part I like mathematics I like French I like Greek. They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
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