We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that just like plants, we must choose whether to embrace enlightenment or stay in ignorance.
Simone Weil uses the metaphor of plants to emphasize the importance of light, which represents knowledge, awareness, and truth. Just as plants thrive in light, humans flourish when they seek understanding and clarity, while remaining in darkness leads to stagnation and lack of growth. The quote invites introspection about our choices in life and encourages us to seek the light that nourishes our development.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal development.
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?
Man never dies, nor is he ever born; bodies die, but he never dies.
All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is 'important' in the sense of being 'worthy of being known.'
Rape is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.
To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now.
It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.
What is true stillness? Stillness in movement.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.