Quotes by Simone Weil

“Mathematics alone make us feel the limits of our intelligence. For we can always suppose in the case of an experiment that it is inexplicable because we dont happen to have all the data. In mathematics we have all the data and yet we dont understand. We always come back to the contemplation of our human wretchedness. What force is in relation to our will, the impenetrable opacity of mathematics is in relation to our intelligence.”

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

“A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.”

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.”

“We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.”

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached”

“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.”

“It is an eternal obligation toward the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has a chance of coming to his assistance.”

“Pain is the root of knowledge”

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life”

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell”

“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.”

“Your intelligence is measured by those around you; if you spend your days with idiots you seal your own fate.”

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thoughts are outside language, they are unformulable, although they are perfectly rigorous and clear and although every one of the relations they involve is capable of precise expression in words. So the mind moves in a closed space of partial truth, which may be larger or smaller, without ever being able so much as to glance at what is outside.

We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.

There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.

We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.

He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.

When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.