Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the fallibility of humanism in believing that human beings can achieve ideal values solely through their own efforts.
Simone Weil critiques the humanist belief that qualities like truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are attainable by human effort alone. She argues that these ideals have infinite worth, but their realization requires a form of grace or assistance beyond individual capacity, suggesting that human effort is insufficient without recognizing a higher power or deeper truth.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of moral values in society.
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?
But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.
And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude... I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
As a social concept, 'white' is profound in its meaning. It means people who either come from or appear to come from Europe, but it's necessarily a construct of oppression.
Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
The afterlife looks different to every soul," he said, "depending on whatthey believe. For that guy, Egypt must've made a strong impression when he was young , maybe." "And if someone doesn't believe in any afterlife?" i asked. Walt gave me a sad look. "Then that's what they experience.
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