Insights from Simone Weil

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, "What are you going through?"

The payment of debts is necessary for social order. The non-payment is quite equally necessary for social order. For centuries humanity has oscillated, serenely unaware, between these two contradictory necessities.

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.

The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.

For when two beings who are not friends are near each other there is no meeting, and when friends are far apart there is no separation.

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.