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.

“In the domain of the spirit evil produces only evil and good produces only good.” (Simone Weil)

If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one’s own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.

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

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Gratitude is first of all the business of him who helps, if the help is pure. It is only by virtue of reciprocity that it is due from him who is helped.

The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

True faith implies great discretion, even with regard to itself. It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have scarcely any part.

A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations.

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them are mute suppliants, eternally condemned to stand speechless in our presence.

Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science.

To kill by our thought everything we love: the only way to die.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

The extinction of desire (Buddhism)—or detachment—or amor fati—or desire for the absolute good—these all amount to the same: to empty desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without any wishes.

Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time. We have to prevent it from being diluted 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 be intolerable.

I feel that it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

One of the most dangerous forms of sin, or perhaps the most dangerous, consists of introducing what is unlimited into a domain that is essentially finite.

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognised. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.