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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.

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
Anything
Forms
Thing
Degrees
Never
Subject
Owed
Intellectual
Adherence
Subjects
Voluntary
Alone
Whatsoever
Attention
Obligation
Form
Degree

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It is human misery and not pleasure which contains the secret of the divine wisdom.
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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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Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism, adoring nothing but itself. Israel is the Great Beast of religion. Neither one nor the other is likable. The Great Beast is always repulsive
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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.
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The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
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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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The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us coming through matter.
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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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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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Compassion directed to oneself is humility.
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Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
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We only possess what we renounce what we do not renounce escapes from us.
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The development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.
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In this world we live in a mixture of time and eternity. Hell would be pure time.
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I only read what I am hungry for at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat.
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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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Love: To feel with one's whole self the existence of another being.
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Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
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Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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The only great spirit of our time.
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