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.
Interpretation
Affliction can deeply affect our inner selves, leaving marks similar to those of a brand, filled with negative emotions.
Simone Weil's quote explores the psychological impact of affliction, suggesting that suffering can leave deep scars on our souls. Instead of just a temporary discomfort, it hardens us and instills feelings of guilt and self-hatred, akin to the lasting imprint of a hot iron. The comparison highlights how profound human emotions, like scorn and disgust, are triggered by our experiences, transforming our inner worlds significantly.
In practice
In a discussion about mental health, this quote can be used to illustrate how deep pain can affect one's self-perception.
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.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Remember, if you have not known sadness together with happiness you have not known anything yet. Then your happiness is superficial; your sadness is also superficial. Then you have been living on the surface; then you have known only the waves; you have not known the depth of the ocean that you are.
I hope that at this moment you are thinking of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary.
Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness. And how selfish they make us too.
Damned money! Alas! How many religious did it blind! How many cloistered religious did it deceive! Money is the 'droppings of birds' that blinded the eyes of Tobit.
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