"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."
"During the last quarter of a century all the authority associated with the function of spiritual guidance ... has seeped down into the lowest publications. ... Between a poem by Valéry and an advertisement for a beauty cream promising a rich marriage to anyone who used it there was at no point a breach of continuity. So as a result of literature's spiritual usurpation a beauty cream advertisement possessed, in the eyes of little village girls, the authority that was formerly attached to the words of priests."
6 likes
Source: On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God. Book by Simone Weil. Translated by R. Rees, Morality and literature, p. 164, 1968.
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Simone Weil
"We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them."
"Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on."
"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."
"Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand."
"Just as the power of the sun is the only force in the natural universe that causes a plant to grow against gravity, so the grace of God is the only force in the spiritual universe that causes a person to grow against the gravity of their own ego."