Simone Weil Quotes About Suffering

Quotes about: Suffering

• Pain and suffering are a kind of currency passed from hand to hand until they reach someone who receives them but does not pass them on.

  Simone Weil

  Pain, Hands, Suffering

• Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

  Simone Weil

  Thank You, Gratitude, Joy

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.63, Psychology Press

• The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

  Simone Weil

  Lying, Greatness, Suffering

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.81, Psychology Press

• It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.

  Simone Weil

  Suffering, Chance, Hunger

  Simone Weil (2003). “The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind”, p.5, Routledge

• The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.

  Simone Weil

  Moving, Cutting, Suffering

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.28, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• 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

• I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

  Simone Weil

  Country, Suffering, Humiliation

  Simone Weil (1977). “The Simone Weil Reader”

• 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.

  Simone Weil

  Imagination, Suffering, Ugly

  Simone Weil (1952). “Gravity and Grace”, p.199, U of Nebraska Press

• One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subjected to suffering.

  Simone Weil

  Inspirational, Courage, Suffering

  Simone Weil (2013). “The Notebooks of Simone Weil”, p.19, Routledge

• 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

• Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

  Simone Weil

  Evil, Suffering, Together

  Simone Weil (1998). “Simone Weil”

• Misfortunes leave wounds which bleed drop by drop even in sleep; thus little by little they train man by force and dispose him to wisdom in spite of himself. Man must learn to think ofhimself as a limited and dependent being; and only suffering teaches him this.

  Simone Weil

  Failure, Sleep, Men

• Christ himself came down and took possession of me. . . I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. . . in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.

  Simone Weil

  Real, Imagination, Christian Love

  Simone Weil (1977). “The Simone Weil Reader”

• If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

  Simone Weil

  Thinking, World Suffering, Want Something

  Simone Weil (1998). “Simone Weil”

• 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

• Christians ought to suspect that affliction is the very essence of creation. To be a created thing is not necessarily to be afflicted, but it is necessarily to be exposed to affliction. ... Affliction is the surest sign that God wishes to be loved by us; it is the most precious evidence of His tenderness.

  Simone Weil

  Christian, Essence, Suffering

  Simone Weil (1998). “Simone Weil”

• A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again

  Simone Weil

  Wall, Hate, Men

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.26, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• The same suffering is much harder to bear for a high motive than for a base one. The people [during World War II] who stood motionless, from one to eight in the morning, for the sake of having an egg, would have found it very difficult to do in order to save a human life.

  Simone Weil

  Morning, War, Eight

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin