Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
Interpretation
Grace can only fill moments of lack or emptiness, creating the space needed for its presence.
In this quote, Simone Weil suggests that grace is something that fills the voids in our lives, but it requires those voids to exist in the first place. The concept of grace itself creates the emptiness that allows for a deeper appreciation and acceptance of it, highlighting the interplay between absence and presence in human experience.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming challenges, one might refer to this quote to emphasize that difficulties can lead to moments of grace.
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?
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
History is a pact between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn.
I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.
Thank God I am deemed worthy to be hated by the world.
One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.
As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
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