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If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

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
Love
Desire
Order
Someone
Doe
Inflicts
May
Degrade
Done
Injury
Must
Shall
Really
Evil

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Uprooting is by far the most dangerous of the ills of human society, for it perpetuates itself.
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The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
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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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The essential thing to know about God is that God is Good. All the rest is secondary.
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Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.
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If you say to someone who has ears to hear: What you are doing to me is not just, you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, I have the right... or you have no right to... They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.
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Only an indirect method is effective. We do nothing if we have not first drawn back.
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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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If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.
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Intellectual adherence is never owed to anything whatsoever, for it is never in any degree a voluntary thing. Attention alone is voluntary. It alone forms the subject of an obligation.
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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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We only possess what we renounce what we do not renounce escapes from us.
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Truth is one, but error is manifold.
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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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