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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
Alone
Thing
Wretchedness
Contemplate
Contemplating
God
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More quotes by Simone Weil

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If you say to someone who has ears to hear: What you are doing to me is not just, you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, I have the right... or you have no right to... They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
Simone Weil
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Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
Simone Weil
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The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
Simone Weil
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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.
Simone Weil
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Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
Simone Weil
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Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
Simone Weil
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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.
Simone Weil
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When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.
Simone Weil
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There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
Simone Weil
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Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
Simone Weil
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If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.
Simone Weil
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Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Simone Weil
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The notion of rights is linked with the notion of sharing out, of exchange, of measured quantity. It has a commercial flavor, essentially evocative of legal claims and arguments. Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at.
Simone Weil
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Humility is attentive patience.
Simone Weil
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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.
Simone Weil
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There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.
Simone Weil
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The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?
Simone Weil
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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
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The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.
Simone Weil
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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.
Simone Weil