Simone Weil Gravity And Grace Quotes

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

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

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

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

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

The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.

Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.

Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.

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

Electra weeping for the dead Orestes. If we love God while thinking that he does not exist, he will manifest his existence.

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

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

Distance is the soul of the beautiful.

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, from death does not prevent the Beloved from having lived. That is the punishment for having fed love on imagination.

L’amour n’est pas consolation, il est lumière.

If we know in what way society is unbalanced, we must do what we can to add weight to the lighter scale ... we must have formed a conception of equilibrium and be ever ready to change sides like justice, 'that fugitive from the camp of conquerors'.

Among human beings, only the existence of those we love is fully recognized. Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love.

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.

Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity--the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized.

Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking.

The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.

Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.

Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.

The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, skepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.

Man's great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.

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

There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.

Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes. Instants when everything stands still, instants of contemplation, of pure intuition, of mental void, of acceptance of the moral void. It is through such instants that he is capable of the supernatural.

The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality. That is only perceptible through total detachment. Should only one thread remain, there is still attachment.

It is incontestable that the void which we grasp with the pincers of contradiction is from on high, for we grasp it the better the more we sharpen our natural faculties of intelligence, will and love. The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.

Why is the determination to fight against a prejudice a sure sign that one is full of it? Such a determination necessarily arises from an obsession. It constitutes an utterly sterile effort to get rid of it. In such a case the light of attention is the only thing which is effective, and it is not compatible with a polemical intention.

Humility consists in knowing that in what we call ‘I’ there is no source of energy by which we can rise. Everything, without exception, that is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift, but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.

At a certain moment, the pain is lessened by projecting it into the universe, but the universe is impaired; the pain is more intense when it comes home again, but something in me does not suffer and remains in contact with a universe which is not impaired. - Simone Weil

The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows. That is a factor making for social stability.

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life(there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this breaking of the true pact between the body and the soul. Greek art coincided with the beginning of geometry and with athleticism, the art of the Middle Ages with the craftsmen's guilds, the art of the Renaissance with the beginning of mechanics, etc....Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire (when was it easier to understand Juvenal?). Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy - it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things...It is therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure and without an echo...(but without an echo, no art).

I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. I must love with that part of the soul which is on the other side of the curtain, for the part of the soul which is perceptible to consciousness cannot love nothingness. It has a horror of it. Though it may think it loves nothingness, what it really loves is something other than nothingness.

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The fact of dying for what is strong robs death of its bitterness—and at the same time of all its value.

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not ‘What is the aim?’ It is ‘What is the origin?

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there... When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart.

If we apply to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality, it pierces right through to the eternal.

Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous.

It is better to accept the limit, to contemplate it and savour all its bitterness.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

Piety in regard to the dead: to do everything for what does not exist.

Desire is impossible: it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing

Minä on vain synnin ja erehdyksen luoma varjo; synti ja erehdys pysähdyttävät Jumalasta säteilevän valon. Ja tätä varjoa minä luulen olennoksi. Vaikka voisikin olla Jumalan kaltainen, olisi sittenkin parempi olla liejua, joka tottelee Jumalaa.

The secret of the human condition is that there is no equilibrium between man and the surrounding forces of nature, which infinitely exceed him when in inaction; there is only equilibrium in action by which man recreates his own life through work.

Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt. To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God. I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.

Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so

Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so.

The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence. The fall of Troy. The fall of the petals from a fruit tree in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence— that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.

Nöyryys on samaa kuin tieto, ettei siinä mitä sanotaan "minäksi" ole lainkaan sellaista energiaa, jonka avulla pääsisimme kohoamaan. Kaikki mitä minussa on arvokasta, on poikkeuksetta peräisin muualta; eikä se ole lahjaa vaa lainaa, joka on alituisesti uudistettava. Kaikki mitä minussa itsessäni on, on poikkeuksetta arvotonta; ja jos anastan omakseni muualta saamiani lahjoja, nekin heti muuttuvat arvottomiksi.

Every act should be considered from the point of view not of its object but of its impulsion. The question is not ‘What is the aim?’ It is ‘What is the origin?’ ‘I was naked, and ye clothed me.’ This gift is simply an indication of the state of those who acted in this way. They were in a state which made it impossible for them not to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked; they did not in any way do it for Christ, they could not help doing it because the compassion of Christ was in them. It was the same with Saint Nicholas who, when going across the Russian Steppes with Saint Cassian to meet God, could not help being late for the appointed time of meeting because he had to help a poor peasant to move his cart which had stuck in the mud. Good which is done in this way, almost in spite of ourselves, almost shamefacedly and apologetically, is pure. All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will. Goodness is transcendent. God is Goodness.

To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those af f orded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace (‘Depart from me, O Lord. . . .’). It is one of those things which are added unto us. Every dream of friendship deserves to be shattered. It is not by chance that you have never been loved. . . . To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice. Friendship is not to be sought, not to be dreamed, not to be desired; it is to be exercised (it is a virtue). We must have done with all this impure and turbid border of sentiment. Schluss!

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation—no apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down. To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death. ‘He emptied himself of his divinity.’ To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time—that is to say, to nothing. To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world.

Si nadie se aviene a prestar atención a los pensamientos que, sin saber cómo, se han depositado en un ser tan insuficiente como yo, quedarán enterrados conmigo. Y si, como pienso, contienen verdad, será una lástima. Yo soy perjudicial para ellos. El hecho de que se hayan encontrado en mí impide que se les preste atención, [...] Me resulta muy doloroso el temor de que los pensamientos que han descendido sobre mí estén condenados a muerte por el contagio de mi miseria y de mi insuficiencia. Nunca leo sin estremecimiento la historia de la higuera seca. Me parece que es mi retrato. También en ella la naturaleza era impotente y, sin embargo, no por ello se la excusó.

Base motives have in them more energy than noble ones. Problem: in what way can the energy belonging to the base motives be transferred to the noble ones?

God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

Se että pienimmänkin teon suorittaminen usein tuottaa minulle suunnattomia vaikeuksia, on erityinen armonosoitus, joka on tullut osakseni. Sillä siten minä voin aivan tavallisia tekoja tehdessäni, kenenkään huomioita herättämättä, saada puun juuret katkotuksi. Vaikka emme antaisikaan arvoa ihmisten mielipiteille, emme mahda mitään sille, että epätavallisilla, huomattavilla teoilla aina on kiihottava vaikutuksensa. Tavanomaisiin tekoihin ei liity moista kiihoketta. Kun jonkin tavanomaisen teon suorittaminen tuntuu tavattoman vaikealta, on kyseessä armonosoitus. josta on oltava kiitollinen. Ei saa rukoilla, että tuo vaikutus katoaisi, on rukoiltava, että osaisi käyttää sitä oikein. Yleensä emme saa toivoa, että pääsisimme vajavaisuuksistamme, vaan että armo kirkastaisi ne.

Weil supplants these contradictory images of God (the omnipotent willing God versus the good and loving God) with her version of Plato's dual causality. The real dilemma, for Weil, is that God is simultaneously the author of all that is and only that which is good. Her solution is to transpose Plato's dual causality of Reason and Necessity (Timaeus 48a) into two faces of God: (i) love or grace, as God the Son, the eternal self-renouncing sacrificial Lamb and (ii) necessity or gravity, as God the Father's created order of mechanical secondary causes. The distance between necessity and the Good in Plato thus becomes the distance between God the Father and God the Son in Weil, bridged by the Cross. She then offers this hermeneutical key: 'power' is always a metaphor for necessity or natural and supernatural consequences rather than a direct act of miraculous intervention. Thus, the 'power of God' (whether in wrath or deliverance) in the Bible is an existential description of secondary causes. The reality, she says, is that God is impartial (i.e., 'God causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust' or 'Zeus's golden scales' ). 'Force' as we experience it is the mechanism (necessity) of the world (like gravity )—not arbitrary intervention. Beyond that, force is evil, because it is the opposite of love, which is consent.

Playing off a short story by H. G. Wells, Simone Weil drew an analogy to a land of blind people in which scientists could devise a complete system of physics leaving out the concept of light. Weightless, pressureless, undetectable by the senses — ​why believe in light? To the blind, it need not exist. Occasionally, however, questions might arise among the blind. What makes plants grow upwards, defying the law of gravity? What ripens fruits and seeds? What warms the night into day? Light in a country of the blind, says Weil, parallels the role of God on earth. Some of us sense traces of the supernatural, yet how do we prove it to people who can’t detect it?

A amizade não se procura, não se imagina, não se deseja; exercita-se (é uma virtude)

Everything, without exception, that is of value in me comes from somewhere other than myself, not as a gift, but as a loan which must be ceaselessly renewed.

The cross. The tree of sin was a real tree, the tree of life was a wooden beam. Something which does not give fruit, but only vertical movement. 'The Son of Man must be lifted up and he will draw all men unto himself.' We can kill the vertical movement. Leaves and fruit are a waste of energy if our only wish is to rise.

The destruction of Troy. The fall of petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.

To say that the world is not worth anything, that this life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless what does evil take from us?

The void which is from below is that into which we fall when we allow our natural faculties to become atrophied.

A society like the Church, which claims to be divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains than on account of the evil which sullies it.

As Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” We see this in the very etymology of the word attention, which comes from the Latin verb attendere, meaning “to stretch toward” something. So to give someone or something our full attention is to extend ourselves, our resources, our energy, our generosity. The gift of attention can be extended to other parts of our lives. It can be given societally, to pressing problems such as income inequality, the climate crisis, and systemic racial injustice. Directing our attention to such issues is signaling what

Méthode pour comprendre les images, les symboles. etc. Non pas essayer de les interpréter, mais les regarder jusqu’à ce que la lumière jaillisse.

The irreducible character of suffering which makes it impossible for us not to have a horror of it at the moment when we are undergoing it is destined to bring the will to a standstill, just as absurdity brings the intelligence to a standstill, and absence love, so that man, having come to the end of his human faculties, may stretch out his arms, stop, look up and wait.

When pain and weariness reach the point of causing a sense of perpetuity to be born in the soul, through contemplating this perpetuity with acceptance and love, we are snatched away into eternity.

The object of an action and the level of the energy by which it is carried out are distinct from each other. A certain thing must be done. But where is the energy to be drawn for its accomplishment? A virtuous action can lower a man if there is not enough energy available on the same level.

Love is the teacher of gods and men, for no one learns without desiring to learn. Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

We must not judge. We must be like the Father in heaven who does not judge: by him beings judge themselves.

Obedience is the only pure motive, the only one which does not in the slightest degree seek a reward for the action, but leaves all care of reward to the Father who is in secret and who sees in secret.

He who believes in God is in danger of a still greater illusion—that of attributing to grace what is simply an essentially mechanical effect of nature.

Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing. It is for this that we suffer with resignation, it is for this that we act, it is for this that we pray.

I must withdraw so that God may make contact with the beings whom chance places in my path and whom he loves. It is tactless for me to be there. It is as though I were placed between two lovers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed, but the unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together. If only I knew how to disappear there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear … What do the energy, the gifts, etc. which are in me matter? I always have enough of them to disappear. ‘And death, robbing my eyes of their light, Restores to the day they sullied all in purity … May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

Every dream of friendship deserves to be shattered. It is not by chance that you have never been loved…. To wish to escape from solitude is cowardice.

The death agony is the supreme dark night which is necessary even for the perfect if they are to attain to absolute purity, and for that reason it is better that it should be bitter.

The fall of the petals from fruit trees in blossom. To know that what is most precious is not rooted in existence—that is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul beyond time.

we have to fix our will on the void—to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses. If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void. It has nothing to do with an intellectual process in the present-day sense. The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground. It is only good for servile tasks.

Denial of Saint Peter. To say to Christ: ‘I will never deny Thee’ was to deny him already, for it was supposing the source of faithfulness to be in himself and not in grace.

May that which is low in us go downwards so that what   is high can go upwards.

The object of an action and the level of energy by which it is carried out are distinct from each other. A certain thing must be done. But where is the energy to be drawn for its accomplishment? A virtuous action can lower a man if there is not enough energy available on the same level.

Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails (once its energy has been used up) the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those things which we are unable to not do.

Action is the pointer of the balance. We must not touch the pointer but the weight.

We believe that thought does not commit us in any way, but it alone commits us.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

The world is a text with several meanings, and we pass from one meaning to another by a process of work.

El amor tiene necesidad de realidad. ¿Hay algo más tremendo que descubrir un día que se ama a un ser imaginario a través de una apariencia corporal? Es mucho más tremendo que la muerte, porque la muerte no impide al amado haberlo sido. Ése es el castigo por el crimen consistente en haber alimentado al amor con la imaginación.

If someone does me an injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love from him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. (Routledge; 1 edition, November 14, 2002) Originally published 1947.

Las mismas palabras [por ejemplo, un hombre dice a su mujer, "te amo"] pueden ser triviales o extraordinarias según la forma en que se digan. Y esa forma depende de la profundidad de la región en el ser de un hombre de donde procedan, sin que la voluntad pueda hacer nada. Y, por un maravilloso acuerdo, alcanzan la misma región en quien las escucha. De tal modo, el que escucha puede discernir, si tiene alguna capacidad de discernimiento, cuál es el valor de las palabras.

God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization. The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.