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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.

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
Social
Contradictory
Order
Centuries
Two
Equally
Debt
Serenely
Necessary
Debts
Century
Necessities
Humanity
Unaware
Quite
Payment

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Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.
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It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
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How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
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Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
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The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
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Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
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The great error of nearly all studies of war... has been to consider war as an episode in foreign policies, when it is an act of interior politics.
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It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.
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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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He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.
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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.
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In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
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Humility is attentive patience.
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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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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.
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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.
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Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: 'Why am I being hurt?' harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.
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Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
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Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
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