Simone Weil

"The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself."

"A mind enclosed in language is in prison."

"There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works."

"There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies."

"If three steps are taken without any other motive than the desire to obey God, those three steps are miraculous; they are equally so whether they take place on dry land or on water."

"Love is not consolation. It is light."

"Education -- whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people, or even oneself -- consists in creating motives. To show what is beneficial, what is obligatory, what is good -- that is the task of education. Education concerns itself with the motives for effective action. For no action is ever carried out in the absence of motives capable of supplying the indispensable amount of energy for its execution."

"The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is in running. Where it is lacking there are no real students, but only poor caricatures of apprentices who, at the end of their apprenticeship, will not even have a trade."

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

"Affliction compels us to recognize as real what we do not think possible."

"Herein is a capital truth. It is not the natural capacity, the congenital gift, nor is it the effort, the will, the work, which in the intelligence as sway over the energy capable of making it fully efficacious. It is uniquely the desire, that is, the desire for beauty. This desire, given a certain degree of intensity and purity, is the same thing as genius. At all levels it is the same thing as attention. If this were understood, the whole conception of teaching would be quite other than it is. First, one would realize that the intelligence functions only in joy. Intelligence is perhaps even the only one of our faculties to which joy is indispensible. The absence of joy asphyxiates it."

"Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt."

"In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish."

"We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists."

"There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."

"We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly."

"At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside."