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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Simone Weil

Image
Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.
Simone Weil
Image
Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
Simone Weil
Image
Distance is the soul of beauty.
Simone Weil
Image
Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
Simone Weil
Image
The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
Simone Weil
Image
The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
Simone Weil
Image
Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.
Simone Weil
Image
The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
the instruments of power - arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets - always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable.
Simone Weil
Image
The whole evolution of present-day society tends to develop the various forms of bureaucratic oppression and to give them a sort of autonomy in regard to capitalism as such.
Simone Weil
Image
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
Simone Weil
Image
In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
Simone Weil