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Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the I from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.

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
Worse
Outside
Longer
Fun
Destroys
Wisdom
Affliction
Nothing
Extreme
Extremes
Destroy

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Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.
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What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.
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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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Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.
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Every being cries out in silence to be read differently. Do not be indifferent to these cries.
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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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Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.
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the instruments of power - arms, gold, machines, magical or technical secrets - always exist independently of him who disposes of them, and can be taken up by others. Consequently all power is unstable.
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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.
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The feeding of those that are hungry is a form of contemplation.
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Academic work is one of those fields which contain a pearl so precious that it is worth while to sell all our possessions, keeping nothing for ourselves, in order to be able to acquire it.
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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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Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
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Science is voiceless it is the scientists who talk.
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Man alone can enslave man.
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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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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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Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
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The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.
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Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.
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