Simone Weil Quotes About Values

Quotes about: Values

• Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.

  Simone Weil

  Brother, Betrayal, Military

• Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.

  Simone Weil

  Beauty, Equality, Men

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.53, Wipf and Stock Publishers

• The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color, or to the moral or other value attributed to the human being in question, or to any consideration whatsoever.

  Simone Weil

  Race, Color, Needs

  "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation" (1943)

• When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.

  Simone Weil

  Spiritual, Men, Class

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.174, 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

• In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility of attention.

  Simone Weil

  Stars, Lying, Moon

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.121, Psychology Press

• Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.

  Simone Weil

  Sacrifice, Balance, Looks

• The essential characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of the idea of value.

  Simone Weil

  Ideas, Firsts, Weakness

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

• 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.

• The soul is the human being considered as having a value in itself.

  Simone Weil

  Soul, Humans, Human Beings

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.66, Psychology Press

• Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food-value of something one has never eaten.

  Simone Weil

  Appreciate, Flavor, Form

  Simone Weil (1973). “Waiting for God: Translated by Emma Craufurd ; With an Introd. by Leslie A. Fiedler”

• science has now been for a long time - and to an ever-increasing extent - a collective enterprise. Actually, new results are always, in fact, the work of specific individuals; but, save perhaps for rare exceptions, the value of any result depends on such a complex set of interrelations with past discoveries and possible future researches that even the mind of the inventor cannot embrace the whole.

  Simone Weil

  Science, Past, Discovery

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

• The authentic and pure values, truth, beauty, and goodness, in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object. Teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act. All the other advantages of instruction are without interest.

  Simone Weil

  Teaching, Should Have, Training

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.120, Psychology Press

• Everything without exception which is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.

  Simone Weil

  Loan, Exception, Values

  Simone Weil (2002). “Gravity and Grace”, p.31, Psychology Press

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