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The real stumbling-block of totalitarian regimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.

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
Spiritual
Permanent
Thought
Nervous
Totalitarian
States
Physical
Stumbling
Need
Except
Regimes
Real
Youth
Inability
Needs
Stand
Strain
Years
State
Excitement
Men
Freedom
Block

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Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the I from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.
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Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
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I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
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The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
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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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There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
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If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
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What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
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Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
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Science is voiceless it is the scientists who talk.
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The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.
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Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
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Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
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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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The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
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To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
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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.
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Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.
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Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.
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