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The contradictions the mind comes up against, these are the only realities, the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

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
Mind
Imaginary
Contradiction
Necessity
Test
Tests
Criterion
Comes
Contradictions
Reality
Criteria
Real
Realities

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A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again
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What hope is there for innocence if it is not recognized?
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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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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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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.
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Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
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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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Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.
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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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One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.
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An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower.
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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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Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego.
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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.
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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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The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.
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Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.
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As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
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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.
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The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
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