"We must not try to change within ourselves or to efface desires and aversions, pleasures and sorrows. We must submit to them passively, just as we do the impressions we receive from colors, according them no greater credit to them than in the latter case. ... We must compel ourselves by violence to act as though we had not a certain desire or aversion, without trying to persuade our sensibility—compelling it to obey. This causes it to revolt and we have to endure this revolt passively, taste of it, savor it, accept it as something outside ourselves, as the pink color of the room with the red window. ... Each time we do violence to ourselves in this spirit we make an advance, slight or great but real, in the work of training the animal within us."
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Despite her short life, her ideas concerning religion, spirituality and politics have remained widely influential in contemporary philosophy.
"May the eternal light give, not a reason for living and working, but a sense of completeness which makes the search for any such reason unnecessary. Failing that, the only incentives are fear and gain—fear, which implies the oppression of the people; gain, which implies the corruption of the people."
"It is impossible for an order which is higher and therefore infinitely above another to be represented in it except by something infinitely small. A grain of mustard seed, an instant mirroring eternity, etc."
"The wrong way of seeking. The attention fixed on a problem. Another phenomenon die to horror of the void. We do not want to have lost our labour. The hear of the chase. We must not want to find: as in the case of excessive devotion, we become dependent on the object of our efforts. We need an outward reward which chance sometimes provides and which we are ready to accept at the price of a deformation of truth.."
"How has unconsciousness infiltrated itself into methodical thought and action? To escape by return to a primitive state is a lazy solution. We have to rediscover the original pact between the spirit and the world in this very civilization of which we form a part. But it is a task which is beyond our power on account of the shortness of life and the impossibility of collaboration and succession. That is no reason for not undertaking it. The situation of all of us is comparable to that of Socrates when he was awaiting death in his prison and began to learn to play the lyre. At any rate we shall have lived."
"It is better to say, ‘I am suffering’ than ‘this landscape is ugly’."
"La volonté de combattre un préjugé … constitue un effort tout à fait stérile pour s’en débarrasser. La lumière de l’attention en pareille affaire est seule efficace, et elle n’est pas compatible avec une intention polémique."