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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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Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
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It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.
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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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Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.
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Science is voiceless it is the scientists who talk.
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Distance is the soul of beauty.
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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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When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: It is the trade entering his body. Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the universe, the order and beauty of the world, and the obedience of God that are entering our body.
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Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
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A man thinks he is dying for his country, said Anatole France, but he is dying for a few industrialists. But even that is saying too much. What one dies for is not even so substantial and tangible as an industrialist.
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Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
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Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.
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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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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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What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.
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Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end.
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The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.
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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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Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
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Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
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