Simone Weil Quotes

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.

The human mind will not be confined to any limits.

Surely there is grandeur in knowing that in the realm of thought, at least, you are without a chain; that you have the right to explore all heights and depth; that there are no walls nor fences, nor prohibited places, nor sacred corners in all the vast expanse of thought.

You have to liberate yourself first from the prejudices of the world in which you live.

Thought takes man out of servitude, into freedom.

The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.

The biggest thing I've learnt is not to limit myself by the norm or what I should be doing.

Intellectual liberty is the air of the soul, the sunshine of the mind, and without it, the world is a prison, the universe is a dungeon.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none.

Now therefore, that my mind is free from all cares, and that I have obtained for myself assured leisure in peaceful solitude, I shall apply myself seriously and freely to the general destruction of all my former opinions.

We all would love sometimes to be free from our own knowledge. It is even the most difficult to unlearn - as the most important problems are.

Es binden Sklavenfesseln nur die H a« nde, Der Sinn, er macht den Freien und den Knecht. The chains of slavery can only bind the hands. The mind makes us either free or enslaved.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.

You cannot write in more than one language. Words don't come out as well.

When human beings are scared and feel everything is exposed to the government, we will censor ourselves from free thinking. That's dangerous for human development.

When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity.

Your way begins at the other side. Become the sky.

Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

I suppose the word "unbearable" is a lie by definition. Unless you kill yourself immediately after using it.

It is one of the signs of the times. We confess that we have risen from reading this book with enlarged ideas, and grander conceptions of our duties in this world. It did expand us a little.

Opinions are not to be learned by rote, like the letters of an alphabet, or the words of a dictionary. They are conclusions to be formed, and formed by each individual in the sacred and free citadel of the mind, and there enshrined beyond the arm of law to reach, or force to shake; ay! and beyond the right of impertinent curiosity to violate, or presumptuous arrogance to threaten.

Be strong, get beyond all superstitions, and be free.

All our thinking is of this nature, a free play with concepts.