Quotes by Simone Weil

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

What a country calls its vital… interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.

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.

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.

The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.