With no matter what human being, taken individually, I always find reasons for concluding that sorrow and misfortune do not suit him; either because he seems too mediocre for anything so great, or, on the contrary, too precious to be destroyed.- Simone Weil
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.
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.
When a contradiction is impossible to resolve except by a lie, then we know that it is really a door.
Whatever debases the intelligence degrades the entire human being.
What a country calls its vital... interests are not things that help its people live, but things that help it make war.
We must prefer real hell to an imaginary paradise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life.
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.
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.
