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

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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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We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
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In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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Fire destroys that which feeds it.
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We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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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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It is impossible that the whole of truth should not be present at every time and every place, available for anyone who desires it.
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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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A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
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The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.
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The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
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prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.
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The recognition of human wretchedness is difficult for whoever is rich and powerful because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something. It is equally difficult for the man in miserable circumstances because he is almost invincibly led to believe that the rich and powerful man is something.
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Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
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In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
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Meditation on the chance which led to the meeting of my mother and father is even more salutary than meditation on death.
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Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love andjustice.
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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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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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School children and students who love God should never say: For my part I like mathematics I like French I like Greek. They should learn to like all these subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.
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