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?
To communicate through silence is a link between the thoughts of man.
I have always been reasonably leery of religion because there are so many edicts in religion, 'thou shalt not,' or 'thou shalt.' I wanted my world of the future to be clear of that.
I reject karma and rebirth not only because I find them unintelligible, but because I believe they obscure and distort what the Buddha was trying to say. Rather than offering the balm of consolation, the Buddha encouraged us to peer deep and unflinchingly into the heart of the bewildering and painful experience that life can so often be.
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest. (Let no man belong to another that can belong to himself.)
It is a novel kind of supremacy, the best that life can offer, to have as servants by skill those who by nature are our masters.
How can you do the right thing when you can't figure out what that is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?
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