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To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

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
Defile
Possess
Power

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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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A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
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Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.
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The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.
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Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive
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We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?
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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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Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
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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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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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The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
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Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.
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In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
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One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
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The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
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