Simone Weil: Keep your Solitude

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”
― Simone Weil

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
― Simone Weil

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.”
― Simone Weil

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”
― Simone Weil

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. ”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
― Simone Weil

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”
― Simone Weil

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“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.”
― Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”
― Simone Weil

“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
― Simone Weil

“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.”
― Simone Weil

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
― Simone Weil

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.”
― Simone Weil

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”
― Simone Weil

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”
― Simone Weil

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”
― Simone Weil

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― Simone Weil

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”
― Simone Weil

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Humility is attentive patience.”
― Simone Weil

“I can, therefore I am.”
― Simone Weil

“Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him.
Every being cries out silently to be read differently.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”
― Simone Weil