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A mind enclosed in language is in prison.

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
Mind
Enclosed
Prison
Language

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When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
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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.
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We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say 'I.
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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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For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
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It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
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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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Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
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To us, men of the West, a very strange thing happened at the turn of the century without noticing it, we lost science, or at least the thing that had been called by that name for the last four centuries. What we now have in place of it is something different, radically different, and we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is.
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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.
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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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The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.
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Necessity is God's veil.
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The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work.
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Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.
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Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.
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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 recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.
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One might lay down as a postulate: All conceptions of God which are incompatible with a movement of pure charity are false. All other conceptions of him, in varying degree, are true.
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