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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
Language
Mind
Enclosed
Prison

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There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.
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To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
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Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.
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The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.
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The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavor, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.
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Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
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The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.
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Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.
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Imaginary evil is romantic and varied real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.
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Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.
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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
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What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
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Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.
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One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.
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Truth is one, but error is manifold.
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We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
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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.
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The only great spirit of our time.
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Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
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