"Conformity is an imitation of grace."
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Quote collection
Simone Weil quotes (page 18 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms."
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"War, which perpetuates itself under the form of preparation for war, has once and for all given the State an important role in production."
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"Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence."
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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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"The necessity for power is obvious, because life cannot be lived without order; but the allocation of power is arbitrary because all men are alike, or very nearly. Yet power must not seem to be arbitrarily allocated, because it will not then be recognized as power. Therefore prestige, which is illusion, is of the very essence of power."
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"The full expression of personality depends upon its being inflated by social prestige; it is a social privilege."
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"Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life."
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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."
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"Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love."
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"We should desire neither the immortality nor the death of any human being, whoever he may be, with whom we have to do."
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"Algebra and money are essentially levelers; the first intellectually, the second effectively."
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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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"An imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it neither higher nor lower."
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"The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at."
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"The lure of quantity is the most dangerous of all."
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"Why is it that reality, when set down untransposed in a book, sounds false?"
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"Contemplating an object fixedly with the mind, asking myself, 'What is it?' without thinking of any other object or relating it to anything else for hours on end."
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"The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through."
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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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