Simone Weil Quotes

Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

I hit my head against the wall because I don't want to know all the terrible things that I know about. I don't want to feel all these wretched things, but they're in me already. If I don't get rid of them, I'm not ever going to feel anything else.

Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.

Look at it this way: There are many here among us for whom the life force is best represented by the livid twitching of one tortured nerve, or even a full-scale anxiety attack. I do not subscribe to this point of view 100 percent, but I understand it, have lived it. Thus the shriek, the caterwaul, the chainsaw gnarlgnashing, the yowl and the whizz that decapitates may be reheard by the adventurous or emotionally damaged as mellifluous bursts of unarguable affirmation.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.

The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.

People have pain - they do regrettable things, they feel shame, and shame equals pain.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

We're tortured, a lot of us, believe me.

The more unhappy you are, the more miserable you are, the more you're going to suffer.

Not treasured wealth, nor the consul's lictor, can dispel the mind's bitter conflicts and the cares that flit, like bats, about your fretted roofs.

At 9:10 I'm going to be filled with self-hatred.

Inwardly, I gouged my eyes out.

Hatred is always self hatred, and there is something suicidal about it.

Most self-laceration is more noisy than painful.

Misery don't call ahead. That's why you have to stay awake - otherwise it just walks on in your door.

Suffering... is not just lots of pain but pain amplified by distinctly human emotions such as regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation, and dread.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

There's nothing wrong with me...except acute chronic fear.

Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Physical suffering apart, not a single sorrow exists that can touch us except through our thoughts.

But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.