Simone Weil Quotes

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.

Morality is not only taught; it is caught.

It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Moral Education is the source of that spiritual equilibrium on which everything else depends and which may be compared to that physical equilibrium or sense of balance, without which it is impossible to stand upright or to move into any other position.

The most sure, but at the same time the most difficult expedient to mend the morals of the people, is a perfect system of education.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

The rigid volunteer rules of right and wrong in sports are second only to religious faith in moral training.

Teaching at best beckons us to morality, but it is not in itself efficacious. Teaching is like a mirror. It can show you if your face is dirty, but it the mirror will not wash your face.

If education is to develop human nature so that it may attain the object of its being, it must involve the exercise of judgment.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

The end of knowledge is wisdom The end of culture is perfection The end of wisdom is freedom The end of education is character. And character consists of eagerness to renounce one's selfish greed.

Our virtues and vices couple with one another, and get children that resemble both their parents.

You cannot make men good by law.

Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.

Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.

You want to make a difference in your world? Live a holy life: Be faithful to your spouse. Be the one at the office who refuses to cheat. Be the neighbor who acts neighbors. Be the employee who does the work and doesn't complain. Pay your bills. Do your part and enjoy life. Don't speak one message and live another. People are watching the way we act more than they are listening to what we say.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

The innocence which is simply ignorance is not virtue.

The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be, all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good.