Quotes by Simone Weil

"Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions reality can be attained only by someone who is detached."

"Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does."

"A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless."

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present."

"If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe."

"As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles."

"An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God."

"The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation."

"Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings."

"A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams."

"Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link."

"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace."

"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."

"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."