"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."
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Quote collection
Simone Weil quotes (page 5 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not."
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"We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise."
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"All sins are attempts to fill voids."
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"Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith ; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong."
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"Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty."
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"Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith."
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"The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell."
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"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."
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"To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity."
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"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."
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"The Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the 'chosen people'."
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"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."
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"Attentiveness is the heart of prayer."
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"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."
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"Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it."
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"The glossy surface of our civilization hides a real intellectual decadence."
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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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"Humility is attentive patience."
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"What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war."
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