"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
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Quote collection
Simone Weil quotes (page 1 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them."
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"Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on."
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"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."
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"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."
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"Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego."
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"If you want to know what a man is really like, take notice of how he acts when he loses money."
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"A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves."
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"There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice."
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"The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever."
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"The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running."
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"The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error into which all socialists have fallen, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics when it is especially an act of internal politics and the most atrocious act of all . . . Since the directing apparatus has no other way of fighting the enemy than by sending its own soldiers, under compulsion, to their death-the war of one state against another state resolves itself into a war of the state and the military apparatus against its own people."
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"Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others."
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"Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings."
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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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"More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic."
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"Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought."
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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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"The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"
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"God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience, I have touched it."
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