Simone Weil Quotes

The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.

You are so proud of your intelligence," said the master. "You are like a like a condemned man, proud of the vastness of his prison cell.

Be very slow to believe that you are wiser than all others; it is a fatal but common error.

In modelling, there is no point in trying to prove you have a brain, so why even bother? I'd sooner save the energy for something more meaningful.

I am not very smart, but I recognize that I am not very smart.

I'm tough, I'm pushy, I'm really loud. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about it. But we only have so much brain capacity, so if I'm spending part of my brain thinking about how I'm acting, A, I'm not spending all of my brain doing, and B, I'm not actually in that moment.

He who knows himself best esteems himself least.

Don't believe your own publicity. You can't; you'll start thinking that you're better than you are.

I proved to my own satisfaction that I am madder than I think.

I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

Perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything.

The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

To think to be wise alone is a very great folly.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

You have to think you're the greatest thing since sliced bread, but you have to know that you're not.

I was looking in the mirror the other day and I realized I haven't changed much since I was in my twenties. The only difference is I look a whole lot older now.

People generally treat me like I'm very intelligent and really, I'm much less intelligent than she is. Scully is insanely intelligent.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."

One of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confession of insanities would come up!

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

Every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding.

I am enormously wise and abysmally ignorant.

True intelligence very readily conceives of an intelligence superior to its own; and this is why truly intelligent men are modest.