Quote

Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.

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
Wish
Essence
Suspects
Thing
Created
Tenderness
Evidence
Wishes
Creation
Exposed
Ought
Precious
Afflicted
Loved
Christians
Surest
Suffering
Sign
Affliction
Christian
Necessarily
Suspect

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The world needs saints who have genius, just as a plague-stricken town needs doctors.
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When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.
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It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.
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To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
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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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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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One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.
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Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.
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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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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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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.
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There is only one fault, only one: our inability to feed upon light.
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Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.
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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.
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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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Renunciation is submission to time.
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We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
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If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money.
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The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.
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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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