Simone Weil

“Pain is the root of knowledge.”

“Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.”

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

“Fire destroys that which feeds it.”

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.”

“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 w...”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs dea...”

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

“When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.”

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

“You could not have wished to be born at a better time than this, when everything is lost.”

“Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time...”

“Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”

“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.”

“Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.”