Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.
Simone Weil

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

Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Simone Weil

Humility is attentive patience.
Simone Weil

I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
Simone Weil

I can, therefore I am.
Simone Weil

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.
Simone Weil

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.
Simone Weil

If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.
Simone Weil

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

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Simone Weil

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

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
Simone Weil

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
Simone Weil

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.
Simone Weil

It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.
Simone Weil

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.
Simone Weil

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures.
Simone Weil

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
Simone Weil