Explore Quotes by Simone Weil

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.

If Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

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.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

Nothing is less instructive than a machine.

A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

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.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work.

The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil.