Simone Weil Quotes

It may be beyond the limits of human intelligence to understand how human intelligence works.

Even great spirits have only their five-fingers' breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least important task for human reason rationally to comprehend its own limitations. It is essential for the growth of reason that as individuals we should bow to forces and obey principles which we cannot hope fully to understand, yet on which the advance and even the preservation of civilization depend.

It is not for man to follow the trail of truth too far, since by so doing he entirely loses the directing compass of his mind.

This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.

As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists.

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality.

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

It is consciousness that sets all limits of life, if there are any limits.

Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

Cam was so much clearer, easier to figure out. Like he was algebra and Daniel was calculus.

It is a dangerous and fateful presumption, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend. For after you have established, according to your fine undertstanding, the limits of truth and falsehood, and it turns out that you must necessarily believe things even stranger than those you deny, you are obliged from then on to abandon these limits.

Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations

When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation... when I consider all this... I am silent.

It is impossible to meditate on time and the mystery of nature without an overwhelming emotion at the limitations of human intelligence.

It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand, and what those things are. Human understanding has vulgarly occupied itself with nothing but understanding, but if it would only take the trouble to understand itself at the same time it would simply have to posit the paradox.

It is indeed the boundary of life, beyond which we are not to pass; which the law of nature has pitched for a limit not to be exceeded.

If man should commence by studying himself, he would see how impossible it is to go further.

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

What are the "maximum" limits of acceptance of the term "intellectual"?

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

God can do nothing for me until I recognize the limits of what is humanly possible, allowing Him to do the impossible.