Simone Weil - Collected Quotes

"Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends." (Simone Weil, "The Power of Words", 1937) 

"Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction." (Simone Weil, "The Pre-War Notebook 1933-1939")

"Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of." (Simone Weil, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God", 1942)

"Paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of a great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help required to save him, at the supreme moment of his need." (Simone Weil, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God", 1942)

"In order to be exercised, the intelligence requires to be free to express itself without control by any authority. There must therefore be a domain of pure intellectual research, separate but accessible to all, where no authority intervenes." (Simone Weil, "Statement of Human Obligations", 1943)

"There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties. [...] That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behavior that is mindful of obligations." (Simone Weil, "Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation", 1943)

"Concern for the symbol has completely disappeared from our science. And yet, if one were to give oneself the trouble, one could easily find, in certain parts at least of contemporary mathematics... symbols as clear, as beautiful, and as full of spiritual meaning as that of the circle and mediation. From modern thought to ancient wisdom the path would be short and direct, if one cared to take it." (Simone Weil, "The Need for Roots", 1949)

"The most important part of education - to teach the meaning of to know [in the scientific sense]" (Simone Weil, "Waiting on God", 1950)

"[…] algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world." (Simone Weil, "The Organization of Thought", 1974)

"There are necessities and impossibilities in reality which do not obtain in fiction, any more than the law of gravity to which we are subject controls what is represented in a picture. [...] It is the same with pure good; for a necessity as strong as gravity condemns man to evil and forbids him any good, or only within the narrowest limits and laboriously obtained and soiled and adulterated with evil. [...] The simplicity which makes the fictional good something insipid and unable to hold the attention becomes, in the real good, an unfathomable marvel." (Simone Weil, "Morality and Literature")