A Selection of Simone Weil & Blaise Pascal Quotes

Simone Weil quotes:

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny.”

“Humility is attentive patience.”

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“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”

~ variation ~  

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. ”

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“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”

“An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that he may strip himself of it.”

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

“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.”

“Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

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

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?”

“I can, therefore I am.”

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

“You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”

“The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”

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

“The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know. ”

“Time’s violence rends the soul; by the rent eternity enters.”

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

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

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

“Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.”

“The social order, though necessary, is essentially evil, whatever it may be.”

“Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.”

“Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue).”

“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.”

“History is a tissue of base and cruel acts in the midst of which a few drops of purity sparkle at long intervals.”

“Yes, we are dreaming. Men of action and enterprise are dreamers; they prefer dream to reality. But they use arms to make others dream their dreams. The victor lives his dream; the vanquished lives another's dream.”

“Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.”

“If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

“One must always be prepared to switch sides with justice, that fugitive of the winning camp.”

“Real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought.”

“We should seek neither to escape suffering nor to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering.”

“It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level.”

“Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.”

“Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.”

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

“Money, mechanization, algebra. The three monsters of contemporary civilization.”

“Society is the cave. The way out is solitude.”

“Preserve your solitude.”

“To find extraordinary difficulty in doing an ordinary action is a favor which calls for gratitude.”

“Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.”

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Blaise Pascal quotes:

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”

“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.”

“You always admire what you really don't understand.”

“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”

“Man's sensitivity to the little things and insensitivity to the greatest are the signs of a strange disorder.”

“Little things comfort us because little things distress us.”

“Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.”

“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.”

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter."

“I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”

“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”

“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”