"Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction."
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Quote collection
Simone Weil quotes (page 9 of 19)
374 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Workers need poetry more than bread. They need that their life should be a poem. They need some light from eternity. Religion alone can be the source of such poetry."
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"If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention."
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"The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes."
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"You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything."
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"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them."
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"Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this."
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"If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe."
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"A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless."
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"Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself also without precedent."
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"Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion and whoever wants reality ought to be detached."
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"When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door."
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"We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing."
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"I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances."
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"A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines."
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"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work."
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"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."
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"A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again"
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"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."
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"Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses."
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