Simone Weil Quotes

That is how prison is tearing me up inside. It hurts every day. Every day takes me further from my life.

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.

But those with shattered souls find it very difficult to speak.

We're all damaged somehow."-A Great and Terrible Beauty

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

Everyone is tortured. Do you know anyone who isn't?

Pain is something that's common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren't engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

Pain is the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind.

The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.

But I do nothing upon myself, and yet I am my own executioner.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure

Those 18 months in solitary confinement... bruised my soul. If I had had a weapon, I would have fought my way out.

I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit.

I feel hurt and pain times a million, all the time.

When I'm in pain and grief and despair, my throat is clenched and my heart hurts.

For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted - beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Unhappiness was my god.

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves.