Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Else
Rely
Commercial
Asserted
Must
Tone
Sharing
Contention
Always
Claims
Quantity
Flavor
Notion
Background
Arguments
Argument
Legal
Adopted
Rights
Essentially
Measured
Upon
Laughed
Exchange
Force
Backgrounds
Linked
Evocative

More quotes by Simone Weil

Image
The supernatural virtue of justice consists of behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship.
Simone Weil
Image
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Simone Weil
Image
Algebra and money are essentially levelers the first intellectually, the second effectively.
Simone Weil
Image
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
Simone Weil
Image
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Simone Weil
Image
We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.
Simone Weil
Image
For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
Simone Weil
Image
Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
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
Image
A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.
Simone Weil
Image
In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Simone Weil
Image
Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, without coming any nearer, the very being who is as necessary to him as food.
Simone Weil
Image
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, What are you going through?
Simone Weil
Image
I am not a Catholic but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Simone Weil
Image
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.
Simone Weil
Image
The speed with which bureaucracy has invaded almost every branch of human activity is something astounding once one thinks about it.
Simone Weil