# Simone Weil's most powerful quotes

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer", loving a stranger as oneself and oneself as a stranger, and political parties that kill the sense of truth in souls: Simone Weil's most quoted lines, from Gravity and Grace to The Need for Roots, with their source.

- 27 votes · 13 items
- Nov 24, 2021 · monsieurmanette
- https://even.best/en/l/5161/simone-weil-s-most-powerful-quotes

## Top 13

1. **Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
2. **To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
3. **Among human beings, we only fully recognize the existence of those we love.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
4. **Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
5. **Always regard those in power as dangerous things.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
6. **A man alone in the universe would have no rights, only obligations.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — The Need for Roots (1949).
7. **The enlightened goodwill of people acting as individuals is the only possible principle of social progress.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression (1934).
8. **God can only be present in creation in the form of absence.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
9. **To love purely is to consent to distance, to adore the distance between oneself and what one loves.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
10. **One criterion of the real is that it is hard and rough. In it one finds joys, not pleasantness.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Gravity and Grace (1947).
11. **Parties are organisms publicly and officially set up so as to kill in souls the sense of truth and justice.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1940, published 1950).
12. **Never, in any case, will I agree to judge fitting for one of my fellow men what I judge morally intolerable for myself.** (0 · ▲0 ▼0) — The Workers' Condition (1951).
13. **Affliction forces us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.** (-2 · ▲0 ▼2) — Gravity and Grace (1947).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.