SIMONE WEIL

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.

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

I can, therefore I am.

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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.

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.

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.

Humility is attentive patience.

Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.

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.

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

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

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.

There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

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.

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

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

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.

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

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.

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

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.