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

Simone Weil
Art

More Quotes By Simone Weil

When once a certain class of people has been placed by the temporal and spiritual authorities outside the ranks of those whose life has value, then nothing comes more naturally to men than murder.
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Class Life Men Murder Nothing People Spiritual Value
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
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Blame Fear Men Punishment Smiles
Beauty always promises, but never gives anything.
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Beauty Promises
Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.
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Reality
Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.
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Beauty Equality Grace Humanism Infinite Liberty Thinking Truth Value Wrong
Charity. To love human beings in so far as they are nothing. That is to love them as God does.
Simone Weil
Charity God Love Nothing
We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits – and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
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Consciousness Horses Hurt Thought
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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Country Help People War
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.
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Morality Open Public Tyranny
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.
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Friends Meeting Separation
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
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Order
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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Day Illness Misfortune Poverty Suffering
I can, therefore I am.
Simone Weil
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.
Simone Weil
Circumstances Play
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.
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Intelligence Man
The most important part of teaching is to teach what it is to know.
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Teaching
Culture is an instrument wielded by teachers to manufacture teachers, who, in their turn, will manufacture still more teachers.
Simone Weil
Culture Teachers Will
Oppression that is clearly inexorable and invincible does not give rise to revolt but to submission.
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Oppression
The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.
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Hope Labor Socialism Society Today
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
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Contradiction Lie
One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
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Rights Talking
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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Hell Paradise
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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Work
We can only know one thing about God – that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him.
Simone Weil
God
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.
Simone Weil
History Imagination Influence Life Needs
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.
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Affirmation Contemplation Faith Reality
A mind enclosed in language is in prison.
Simone Weil
Language Mind Prison
In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.
Simone Weil
Serenity Struggle
Evil being the root of mystery, pain is the root of knowledge.
Simone Weil
Being Evil Knowledge Mystery Pain
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.
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Being Chance Hunger Obligation
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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Fools Force Ideas Nothing
An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.
Simone Weil
Faith God Love May
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
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Being Intelligence
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
Simone Weil
Art Fault Friendship Joy Life Want
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.
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Act
Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.
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Life Order
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
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Destruction Past
In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.
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Beliefs Church
Humility is attentive patience.
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Humility Patience
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Simone Weil
Fiction Imagination Life
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.
Simone Weil
Christian Civilization Idea Thought
A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless.
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God Science
The future is made of the same stuff as the present.
Simone Weil
Future Present
Petroleum is a more likely cause of international conflict than wheat.
Simone Weil
Cause Conflict
The role of the intelligence – that part of us which affirms and denies and formulates opinions is merely to submit.
Simone Weil
Intelligence Opinions
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.
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Cause Men Order Victory
Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison.
Simone Weil
Idea Nothing Poison Progress
The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
Simone Weil
Civilization Greatness Lies Spirituality Work
The only way into truth is through one’s own annihilation; through dwelling a long time in a state of extreme and total humiliation.
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Extreme State Time Truth
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.
Simone Weil
Affliction Compassion Listening