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.
— Simone Weil
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.
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
If Germany, thanks to Hitler 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.
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.
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
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.
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.
A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
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.
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
I can, therefore I am.
Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Humility is attentive patience.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
All sins are attempts to fill voids.
The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation.
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.
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.
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
The highest ecstasy is the attention at its fullest.
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
