Simone Weil (/veɪ/; French: [simɔn vɛj] ( listen); 3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist.
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
Every atheist is an idolater- unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought.
Sin is nothing else but the failure to recognize human wretchedness.
Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith.
Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
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.
One has only the choice between God and idolatry. There is no other possibility. For the faculty of worship is in us, and it is either directed somewhere into this world, or into another.
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.
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done
Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word.
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
If a young girl is being forced into a brothel she will not talk about her rights. In such a situation the word would sound ludicrously inadequate.
Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.
Time does us violence; it is the only violence.
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
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.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.