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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
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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
Greatness
Lying
Spiritual
True
Order
Two
World
Conquest
Sorts
More quotes by Simone Weil
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
Simone Weil
Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
Simone Weil
Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.
Simone Weil
The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the 'chosen people'.
Simone Weil
The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade.
Simone Weil
The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
Simone Weil
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
All those who possess in its pure state the love of their neighbour and the acceptance of the order of the world, inclucing affliction-all those, even should they live and die to all appearances atheists, are surely saved.
Simone Weil
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
Simone Weil
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
Simone Weil
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
The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
Simone Weil
Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
Simone Weil
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Simone Weil
There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
Simone Weil
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
Simone Weil
Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.
Simone Weil
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Simone Weil