Simone Weil's most powerful quotes
The top 3 according to 27 votes from people: Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity. · To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger. · Among human beings, we only fully recognize the existence of those we love.. (Updated Nov 24, 2021.)
"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.
Automatically translated (original in Français). See the original
Top 13
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1
Time is an image of eternity, but it is also a substitute for eternity.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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2
To love a stranger as oneself implies the reverse: to love oneself as a stranger.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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3
Among human beings, we only fully recognize the existence of those we love.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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4
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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5
Always regard those in power as dangerous things.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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6
A man alone in the universe would have no rights, only obligations.
The Need for Roots (1949).
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7
The enlightened goodwill of people acting as individuals is the only possible principle of social progress.
Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression (1934).
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8
God can only be present in creation in the form of absence.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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9
To love purely is to consent to distance, to adore the distance between oneself and what one loves.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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10
One criterion of the real is that it is hard and rough. In it one finds joys, not pleasantness.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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11
Parties are organisms publicly and officially set up so as to kill in souls the sense of truth and justice.
On the Abolition of All Political Parties (1940, published 1950).
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12
Never, in any case, will I agree to judge fitting for one of my fellow men what I judge morally intolerable for myself.
The Workers' Condition (1951).
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13
Affliction forces us to recognize as real what we do not think possible.
Gravity and Grace (1947).
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