Simone Weil Quotes About Soul

Quotes about: Soul

• To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

  Simone Weil

  Soul, Important, Needs

  Simone Weil (2003). “The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind”, p.43, Routledge

• Prayer consists simply in giving to God all the careful attention of which the soul is capable.

  Simone Weil

  Prayer, Giving, Soul

• Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.

  Simone Weil

  Powerful, Light, Years

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.33, Routledge

• Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not.

  Simone Weil

  Self, Iron, Hatred

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.40, Routledge

• It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls to despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

  Simone Weil

  Love, Fall, Soul

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.46, Routledge

• When a man's life is destroyed or damaged by some wound or privation of soul or body, which is due to other men's actions or negligence, it is not only his sensibility that suffers but also his aspiration toward the good. Therefore there has been sacrilege towards that which is sacred in him.

  Simone Weil

  Men, Soul, Suffering

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.221, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.

  Simone Weil

  Faith, Lying, Soul

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.81, Routledge

• The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

  Simone Weil

  Evil, Boredom, Soul

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.226, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right through to the soul. . . . When the feeling for beauty happens to be associated with the sight of some human being, the transference of love is made possible, at any rate in an illusory manner. But it is all the beauty of the world, it is universal beauty, for which we yearn.

  Simone Weil

  Beauty, Love Is, Sight

• There is no greater joy for me than looking at the sky on a clear night with an attention so concentrated that all my other thoughts disappear; then one can think that the stars enter into one's soul.

  Simone Weil

  Stars, Night, Thinking

• When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul and social degradation, all at the same time, constitutes the nail. The point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity, spreading throughout space and time.

  Simone Weil

  Pain, Mean, Space

  "Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)".

• Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.

  Simone Weil

  Punishment, Soul, Suffering

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.226, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium. Physical labor may be painful, but it is not degrading as such. It is not art; it is not science; it is something else, possessing an exactly equal value with art and science, for it provides an equal opportunity to reach the impersonal stage of attention.

  Simone Weil

  Art, Men, Opportunity

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.17, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. 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 imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

  Simone Weil

  Filling Up, Law, Space

• There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.

  Simone Weil

  Loyalty, Spring, Law

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.127, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• Time's violence rends the soul, by the rent eternity enters.

  Simone Weil

  Soul, Violence, Eternity

  Simone Weil (1952). “Gravity and Grace”, p.134, U of Nebraska Press

• The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul like pincers to catch hold of God.

  Simone Weil

  Opposites, Soul, Virtue

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.102, Psychology Press

• Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

  Simone Weil

  Punishment, Soul, Needs

  Simone Weil (2003). “The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind”, p.19, Routledge

• prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. Warmth of heart cannot make up for it.

  Simone Weil

  Prayer, Heart, Soul

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.32, Routledge

• Distance is the soul of beauty.

  Simone Weil

  Distance, Soul

  Simone Weil (2013). “The Notebooks of Simone Weil”, p.615, Routledge

• The right to kill: supposing the life of X ... were linked with our own so that the two deaths had to be simultaneous, should we still wish him to die? If with our whole body and soul we desire life and if nevertheless without lying, we can reply 'yes'> then we have the right to kill.

  Simone Weil

  Lying, Rights, Two

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.86, Psychology Press

• Humility consists of knowing that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and to the vicissitudes of change. There must be absolutely acceptance of the possibility that everything material in us should be destroyed. But we must simultaneously accept and repudiate the possibility that the supernatural part of the soul should disappear.

  Simone Weil

  Humility, Acceptance, Knowing

  "Concerning the Our Father". "Waiting on God". Book by Simone Weil, Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, p. 153, 1972.

• In a general way, the literature of the twentieth century is essentially psychological; and psychology consists of describing states of the soul by displaying them all on the same plane, without any discrimination of value, as though good and evil were external to them, as though the effort toward the good could be absent at any moment from the thought of any man.

  Simone Weil

  Men, Evil, Effort

  "On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God". Book by Simone Weil, Translated by R. Rees, "The responsibility of writers," p. 168, 1968.

• If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren affort has brought more light into the soul.

  Simone Weil

  Light, Knowing, Soul

  Simone Weil (2009). “Waiting on God (Routledge Revivals)”, p.32, Routledge

• Moreover, nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune's image.

  Simone Weil

  Soul, Suffering, Facts

  Simone Weil (2005). “War and the Iliad”, New York Review of Books

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