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The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.
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
Ideas
Weakness
Firsts
Value
First
Century
Disappearance
Growing
Twentieth
Almost
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Values
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Essential
Idea
Essentials
More quotes by Simone Weil
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
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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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In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
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The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting.
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A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
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If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.
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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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Algebra and money are essentially levelers the first intellectually, the second effectively.
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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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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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Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
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Science is voiceless it is the scientists who talk.
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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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There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
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The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.
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I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
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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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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
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Beauty is a fruit which we look at without trying to seize it.
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Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.
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