I can, therefore I am.
Simone Weil
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
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.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Humility is attentive patience.
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.
Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.
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.
Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.
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.
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
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.
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.
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
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.
There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.
There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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.
The only way into truth is through one's own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
