"He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence."
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Simone Weil quotes (page 11 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The word 'revolution' is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their deaths; but which does not contain any content."
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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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"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."
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"The entire universe is nothing but a great metaphor."
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"No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope."
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"When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality, they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man's name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous."
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"Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us; it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness."
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"The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry , the only ersatz of God , the only imitation of something which is infinitely far from me and which is I myself."
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"We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in the apprenticeship to virtue."
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"Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten."
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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 essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value."
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"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."
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"In relation to God, we are like a thief who has burgled the house of a kindly householder and been allowed to keep some of the gold. From the point of view of the lawful owner this gold is a gift; Form the point of view of the burglar it is a theft. He must go and give it back. It is the same with our existence. We have stolen a little of God's being to make it ours. God has made us a gift of it. But we have stolen it. We must return it."
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"The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible."
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"As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."
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"Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just."
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"Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror."
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"In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs."
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