Those who love a cause are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it.

— Simone Weil

Those who serve a cause are not those who love that cause. They are those who love the life which has to be led in order to serve it - except in the case of the very purest and they are rare.

— Simone Weil

Today Relative to Yesterday or Tomorrow The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

— Simone Weil

To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.

— Simone Weil

To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.

— Simone Weil

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.

— Simone Weil

We are drawn towards a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. We eat distasteful food, if we have nothing else, because we cannot do otherwise. A moderately greedy man looks out for delicacies, but he can easily do without them. If we have no air we are suffocated, we struggle to get it, not because we expect to get some advantage from it but because we need it. We go in search of sea air without being driven by any necessity, because we like it. In time, it often comes about automatically that the second motive takes the place of the first. This is one of the great misfortunes of our race. A man spokes opium in order to attain to a special condition, which he thinks superior; often, as time goes on, the opium reduces him to a miserable condition which he feels to be degrading; but he is no longer able to do without it.

— Simone Weil

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.

— Simone Weil

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.

— Simone Weil

Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

— Simone Weil