Assorted quotes from Simone Weil
Weil—Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized
Weil—Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.
Weil—Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.
Weil—Carnal love is a degraded image of true love. Chaste human love…is a less degraded image…only in the stupidity of the present day could the idea of sublimation arise.
Weil—Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.
Weil—Death. An instantaneous state, without past or future. Indispensable for entering eternity.
Weil—Every separation is a link.
Weil—Evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world
Weil—Friendship is a miracle by which a person consents to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to him as food.
Weil—God is only the good…the good which is nothing but good can only stand waiting.
Weil—Humility exerts an irresistible power upon God. If God had not been humiliated…he would be inferior to us.
Weil—In general, we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them.
Weil—It is necessary to be dead in order to see things in their nakedness. (cf. Dewey, “Reconstruction”)
Weil—It is not by chance that you have never been loved.
Weil—Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.
Weil—Poetry…a joy which by reason of its unmixed purity hurts, a pain which by reason of its unmixed purity brings peace.
Weil—The beautiful is that which we desire without wanting to eat it.
Weil—The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible.
Weil—The exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.
Weil—The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.
Weil—The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment…is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.
Weil—Time makes manifest that it is not eternity.
Weil—To love purely is to consent to distance.
Weil—We are at the point where (the world) is as bad as possible. For beyond is the stage where evil turns to innocence…
Weil—What greater abdication of God that is represented by time?...We are abandoned in time…God is not in time…
Weil—When genuine friends of God…repeat words they have heard in secret amidst the silence of the union of love, and these words are in disagreement with the teaching of the Church, it is simply that the language of the marketplace is not that of the nuptial chamber.
Weil—Where no direction is imposed either by necessity or by obligation or by God, follow inclination.
Weil, Gravity and Grace—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.
Weil, Gravity and Grace—Writing is like giving birth: we cannot help making the supreme effort. But we also act in like fashion. I need have no fear of not making the supreme effort?provided only that I am honest with myself and that I pay attention.
Weil, Gravity and Grace, p.53—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.
Weil, Lectures on Philosophy—One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world.
Weil, Lectures on Philosophy—One might say, with the pragmatists, that all science reduces itself to a process of action on nature, but it is necessary to add the word methodical.
Weil, Lectures on Philosophy—Reality comes into view when we see that nature is not only an obstacle which allows us to act in an ordered way but it is also an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.
Weil, Lectures on Philosophy—There is nothing real whenever there is nothing unforeseen. In science, in reasoning, one sees in the problems one is dealing with only what one has put there oneself (hypotheses). If in actions there was nothing except what we ourselves suppose them to contain, nothing would ever get done, since there would be no snags. All sorts of accidents can occur between the time when I have seen what the problem is and the time when I have acted. Reality is defined by that. It is what is not contained in the problem as such; reality is what method does not allow us to foresee.
Why is it that reality can only appear like this, in a negative sort of way? What marks off the ?self? is method; it has no other source than ourselves: it is when we really employ method that we really begin to exist. As long as one employs method only on symbols one remains within the limits of a sort of game. In action that has method about it, we ourselves act, since it is we ourselves who found the method; we really act because what is unforeseen presents itself to us.
Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, p.111 (Emphasis added)—Reality comes into view when we see that nature is not only an obstacle which allows us to act in an ordered way but it is also an obstacle which infinitely transcends us.
Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 116 - Reading-except where there is a certain quality of attention—obeys the law of gravity. We read the opinions suggested by gravity (the preponderant part played by the passions and by social conformity in the judgments we form of men and events).

With a higher quality of attention our reading discovers gravity itself, and various systems of possible balance…
Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 116—We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.
Weil, in The Simone Weil Anthology, ed. George A. Panichas. —The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: cf. The Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.
Weil, in The Simone Weil Anthology, ed. George A. Panichas. —The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism; cf. The Upanishads, the Taoists, and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.
Weil: “The Iliad: Poem of Might”—Even when war is experienced, it does not immediately cease to appear as a game…the soul only submits to the necessity of war when escape from it is impossible; and so long as the soul does escape, it lives irresponsible days, empty of necessity, days of frivolity, of dream, arbitrary and unreal…But…the day comes when fear, defeat or the death of beloved companions crushes the warrior’s soul beneath the necessity of war. Then war ceases to be a play or a dream…
Weil: “The Iliad: Poem of Might”—That soul daily suffers violence which every morning must mutilate its aspirations because the mind cannot move about in a time without passing through death. In this way war wipes out every conception of a goal, even all thoughts concerning the goals of war. The possibility of so violent a situation is inconceivable when one is outside it, its ends are inconceivable when one is involved in it. Therefore no one does anything to bring about its end. The man who is faced by an armed enemy cannot lay down his arms.
Weil: “The Iliad: Poem of Might”—The human beings around us exert just by their presence a power which belongs uniquely to themselves to stop, to diminish, or modify, each movement which our bodies design.
Weil: “The Iliad: Poem of Might”—The resulting whole would be a dismal monotony were there not, sprinkled here and there, luminous moments, brief and divine moments in the souls of men. In such moments the soul which awakes, only to lose itself again to the empire of might, awakes pure and intact, realizes itself whole.-174

Revised on October 3, 2006 01:34 by Nick