Simone Weil Quotes

Beauty, more than bitterness, makes the heart break.

Life is a succession of afflictions for the heart.

The first pressure of sorrow crushes out from our hearts the best wine; afterwards the constant weight of it brings forth bitterness, the taste and stain from the lees of the vat.

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.

An ear can break a human heart As quickly as a spear, We wish the ear had not a heart So dangerously near.

Even as the words came out of my mouth, my heart was dying a million deaths.

Sorrow is too great to exist in small hearts.

So loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man among us whose heart did not bleed at the sound.

Lie still, lie still, my breaking heart; My silent heart, lie still and break: Life, and the world, and mine own self, are changed For a dream's sake.

When he turned to face her, the drawn look on his face was one of absolute agony as if Luce had just ripped his heart out

Generally we are occupied either with the miseries which now we feel, or with those which threaten; and even when we see ourselves sufficiently secure from the approach of either, still fretfulness, though unwarranted by either present or expected affliction, fails not to spring up from the deep recesses of the heart, where its roots naturally grow, and to fill the soul with its poison.

O madam, my old heart is cracked, it's cracked!

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

Sorrow eats your heart and courage.

Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book [The Lord of the Rings] which will break your heart."

The heart, when broken, is like sweet gums and spices when beaten; for as such cast their fragrant scent into the nostrils of men, so the heart, when broken, casts its sweet smell into the nostrils of God.

Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

Through the senses, anger comes, and sorrow comes.

Extreme torture is mute, and so we sat silent, petrified, like columns of marble buried under the sand of an earthquake. Neither wished to listen to the other because our heart-threads had become weak and even breathing would have broken them.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.

tell me how does it feel with my teeth in your heart!

My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Tonight, once more, life sinks its teeth into my heart.