Simone Weil Zitate auf Englisch

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

Simone Weil

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

Simone Weil

Humility is attentive patience.

Simone Weil

It is not the cause for which men took up arms that makes a victory more just or less, it is the order that is established when arms have been laid down.

Simone Weil

The role of the intelligence - that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.

Simone Weil

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.

Simone Weil

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

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All sins are attempts to fill voids.

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If we are suffering illness, poverty, or misfortune, we think we shall be satisfied on the day it ceases. But there too, we know it is false; so soon as one has got used to not suffering one wants something else.

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

Simone Weil

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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I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

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Equality is the public recognition, effectively expressed in institutions and manners, of the principle that an equal degree of attention is due to the needs of all human beings.

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When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.

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I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.

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

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

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Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.

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To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

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

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In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

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Difficult as it is really to listen to someone in affliction, it is just as difficult for him to know that compassion is listening to him.

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Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.

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

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There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.

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Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.

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There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.

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A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it, not pleasure. What is pleasant belongs to dreams.

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Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.

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

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I can, therefore I am.

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

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The future is made of the same stuff as the present.

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Every time that I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.

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Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses.

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