Quote

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.

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
Ends
Contemplating
Anything
Object
Without
Asking
Mind
Objects
Thinking
Vision
Seeing
Hours
Else
Relating

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The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.
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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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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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Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
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The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the 'chosen people'.
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Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
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Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
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The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.
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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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There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
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Time's violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters.
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Evil is neither suffering nor sin it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.
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Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
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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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Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.
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Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
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Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
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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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