Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.
Interpretation
True love for a cause involves embracing the life and sacrifices required to support it.
Simone Weil's quote highlights the profound connection between passion for a cause and the lifestyle that accompanies it. Those who genuinely commit to a cause do so by accepting the challenges and responsibilities that come with it, demonstrating that love for a cause is intertwined with the dedication to the life one must lead to serve it effectively.
In practice
In a speech about volunteerism, one might say, 'As Simone Weil put it, those who love a cause are truly embracing the life that comes with serving it.'
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?
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.
The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.