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Simone Weil Quotes

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"Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure."

"Purity is the power to contemplate defilement."

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

"The poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."

"With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed."

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

"We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful."

"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."

"The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work."

"If Germany, thanks to and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know."

"In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs."

"Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it."

"The proper method of philosophy consists in clearly conceiving the insoluble problems in all their insolubility and then in simply contemplating them, fixedly and tirelessly, year after year, without any hope, patiently waiting."

"To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny."

"Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission."

"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."

"Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat."

"What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war."

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