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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.

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
Wretchedness
Contemplate
Contemplating
God
Image
Alone
Thing

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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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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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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.
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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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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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We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
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In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
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What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
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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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Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.
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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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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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Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.
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Renunciation is submission to time.
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The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
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To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
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When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.
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The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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In this world, only those people who have fallen to the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, who are not just without any social consideration but are regarded by all as being deprived of that foremost human dignity, reason itself - only those people, in fact, are capable of telling the truth. All the others lie.
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