"Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison."
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Quote collection
Simone Weil quotes (page 7 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else."
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"We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will."
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"Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility."
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"The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry."
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"It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people."
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"It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me."
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"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."
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"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."
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"Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge."
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"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."
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"A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast."
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"Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it."
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"There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too."
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"It is only from the light which streams constantly from heaven that a tree can derive the energy to strike its roots deep into the soil. The tree is in fact rooted in the sky."
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"Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void."
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"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God."
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"The work of art which I do not make, none other will ever make."
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"To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal."
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"Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it."
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