Quote

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.

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
Still
Kill
Body
Rights
Soul
Dies
Simultaneous
Without
Lying
Supposing
Whole
Wish
Reply
Right
Desire
Deaths
Life
Two
Linked
Stills
Nevertheless

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More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
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In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.
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Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
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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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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.
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Gregorian chant, Romanesque architecture, the Iliad , the invention of geometry were not, for the people through whom they were brought into being and made available to us, occasions for the manifestation of personality.
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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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In reality nothing is so beautiful as the good, nothing is so monotonous and boring as evil.
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Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?
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Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
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Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
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The need of truth is more sacred than any other need.
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The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
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School children and students who love God should never say: For my part I like mathematics I like French I like Greek. They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
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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 recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.
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Distance is the soul of beauty.
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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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The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
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...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude for he is a thinking creature.
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