Simone Weil Quotes

If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water.

Love is not consolation. It is light.

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.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.

In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.

Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.

La beauté séduit la chair pour obtenir la permission de passer jusqu'à l'âme.

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached.

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

The danger is not that the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but that, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.