We currently find ourselves in a state of unstable social equilibrium that should be transformed [...] into a stable equilibrium.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Simone Weil
Simone Adolphine Weil (3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, mystic, and political activist. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher.
A new order, even if it involves [...] certain important concessions, would be far preferable [...] to disorder.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
It consists of establishing a certain balance [...] between the rights that workers can legitimately claim as human beings and the material interest of production.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Workers [...] naturally tend to take their rights and dignity as human beings into account.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
What has been lost on the side of terror [...] must be attempted to be regained on the side of higher motives: professional pride, love of work, [...] a sense of responsibility.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Workers must be able to bring into play the faculties that no human being can allow to be stifled within themselves without suffering and without degradation: initiative, inquiry, [...] responsibility.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The feeling of inferiority is not conducive to the development of human faculties.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Work discipline should no longer be unilateral, but based on the notion of reciprocal obligations. Only on this condition can it be accepted, and no longer simply endured.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Respect for human life must limit the power to take an action [...] that risks shattering a life.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Workers should no longer be ignorant of what they are making [...]; they must be given the feeling of collaborating in a work, the notion of the coordination of tasks.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
They must be given the feeling that the company is alive, and that they are participating in this life.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
We must seek methods of work [...] that stimulate the highest motives in workers [...] and give them maximum freedom without undermining order.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
In this field, experience alone decides, and the boldest initiatives are the best.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The essential knowledge concerning God is that God is the Good. Everything else is secondary.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
To know divinity only as power and not as good is idolatry [...]. It is only because the Good is unique that one must recognize a single God.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The salvation of the soul takes place in the other world, but the salvation of the State takes place in this one.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The very notion of a chosen people is incompatible with the knowledge of the true God. It is social idolatry, the worst idolatry.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
the only unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit, consists in saying that good, recognized as such, proceeds from evil.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
To be ready, unconditionally and without restriction, to love the good wherever it appears, to the full extent that it appears, is the impartiality commanded by Christ.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
All authentic good is of divine and supernatural origin.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Wherever there is good, there is supernatural contact with God, even in a fetishistic and cannibalistic tribe [...].
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
whoever gives to an unfortunate person without their left hand knowing what their right hand is doing has God present in them.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
When a command is unjust, a miracle is very little to make one admit that it comes from God.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The Hebrews [...] had no notion of a distinction between God and the devil. They indiscriminately attributed to God all that is extra-natural [...] because they conceived of God under the attribute of power and not [...] of good.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
no one can ascertain what the relationship is between a soul and God; but there is a way of conceiving life [...] that only appears in a soul after the transformation produced by the union of love with God.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
[...] through suffering, knowledge. It is distilled in sleep near the heart, the suffering which is painful memory; and even to one who does not want it, wisdom comes.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The universe consents to obey God; in other words, it obeys out of love.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Greek geometry is a prophecy. [...] originally it constituted a symbolic language concerning religious truths.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
A philosophy of work is not materialistic. [...] It encloses man's relationship with the antagonistic term. The antagonistic term is matter.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The less meaning a formula has, the thicker the veil that covers the illegitimate contradictions of a thought.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Truth is too dangerous to touch. It is an explosive.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[In a system where] force [...] is everything, it leaves no hope for justice. It doesn't even leave the hope of conceiving it in its truth, since thoughts only reflect the relations of force.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Most human beings do not doubt the truth of a thought without which they literally could not live.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Man cannot bear for more than a moment to be alone in wanting good. He needs an all-powerful ally.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The essential contradiction in human life is that man [...] is at the same time subject [...] to a blind force, to a necessity absolutely indifferent to the good.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Far from contradiction always being a criterion of error, it is sometimes a sign of truth.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Materialism accounts for everything, except the supernatural. [...] if one does not take the supernatural into account, one is right to be a materialist.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[Some] naively believed that justice is of this world. That is the extremely dangerous illusion.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Social matter is an infinitely more difficult obstacle to overcome than the flesh itself between the soul and the good.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
One has only understood [a] truth [...] when one has recognized it to be true for oneself.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The most violent struggles often pit people against each other who think exactly or almost exactly the same thing.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Each professional group creates for itself a morality by virtue of which the exercise of the profession [...] is beyond the reach of evil.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
They call just and beautiful the things that are necessary, for they are ignorant of how great in reality is the distance that separates the essence of the necessary from that of the good.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The fact that they [parties] exist is by no means a reason to preserve them. Only the good is a legitimate reason for preservation.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Democracy, the power of the majority, are not goods in themselves. They are means to an end, the good, rightly or wrongly considered to be effective.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Only that which is just is legitimate. Crime and lies never are.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Collective passion is an impulse to crime and falsehood infinitely more powerful than any individual passion.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
A political party is a machine for manufacturing collective passion.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
The primary, and in the final analysis, the sole end of every political party is its own growth, and this without any limit.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Every party is totalitarian in germ and in aspiration.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Collective thought is incapable of rising above the domain of facts. It is an animal-like way of thinking.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
If one has a criterion for good other than the good itself, one loses the notion of the good.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Parties are organizations publicly, officially constituted in such a way as to kill in souls the sense of truth and justice.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
[...] by joining a party, one gives up the sole pursuit of public good and justice.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
It is by desiring truth with an empty soul and without attempting to guess its content in advance that one receives the light. Therein lies the whole mechanism of attention.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
Almost everywhere [...] the act of taking sides [...] has replaced the act of thinking. This is a leprosy that originated in political circles [...].
1940
Source: Note on the General Suppression of Political Parties (S. Weil, ed. 1950)
The great beast is the only object of idolatry, the only ersatz of God, the only imitation of an object that is infinitely distant from me and that is me.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
If one could be selfish, it would be very pleasant. It would be rest. But literally, one cannot.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The collective is the object of all idolatry; it is what chains us to the earth.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
What we want is the absolute good. What we can attain is the good that is correlative to evil. [...] It is the social that casts the color of the absolute upon the relative.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Society is the cave, the way out is solitude.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
It is only by entering the transcendent, the supernatural, the authentic spiritual, that man becomes superior to the social. Until then, [...] the social is transcendent in relation to man.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One always commits without knowing.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Marxism, insofar as it is true, is entirely contained in Plato's page on the great beast, and its refutation is also contained therein.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Agreement between several people contains a feeling of reality. [...] Deviation from this agreement appears as a sin.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Thus social reprobation is a stroke of luck.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The service of the false God (of the social Beast) purifies evil by eliminating horror. To those who serve it, nothing seems evil, except for failures in that service.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To see a good, loved as such, as condemned by the forthcoming course of events is an unbearable pain. [...] This is submission to the great beast.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
A Pharisee is a man who is virtuous through obedience to the great beast.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
A nation as such cannot be an object of supernatural love. It has no soul. It is a great beast.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Rootedness is something other than the social.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Force is not a machine for automatically creating justice. It is a blind mechanism from which emerge [...] by the play of probabilities, almost always unjust effects.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If force is absolutely sovereign, justice is absolutely unreal. But it is not. [...] It is real in the depths of the human heart.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is not in a man's power to exclude absolutely all forms of justice from the ends he assigns to his actions.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A man who takes the trouble to elaborate an apology for slavery does not love justice. The century in which he lives makes no difference.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If justice is indelible in the human heart, it has a reality in this world.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
In this world, life [...] is nothing but a lie, and only death is true. For life compels one to believe what one needs to believe in order to live.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
For religious feeling to proceed from the spirit of truth, one must be totally ready to abandon one's religion, even if it means losing all reason for living, in case it should be something other than the truth.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
God must not be for a human heart a reason for living in the way that treasure is for the miser.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Faith is above all the certainty that the good is one. To believe that there are several distinct and mutually independent goods, such as truth, beauty, morality, is what constitutes the sin of polytheism.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The acquisition of knowledge brings one closer to the truth when it is a matter of the knowledge of what one loves, and in no other case.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Instead of speaking of a love of truth, it is better to speak of a spirit of truth in love.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The true definition of science is that it is the study of the beauty of the world.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
What is sovereign here below is determination, the limit. Eternal Wisdom imprisons this universe in a network, in a net of determinations.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
All visible and palpable force is subject to an invisible limit that it will never cross.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Everything changes when, by virtue of a true attention, [a man] empties his soul to allow the thoughts of eternal wisdom to enter. He then carries within him the very thoughts to which force is subject.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Human life is impossible. But only misfortune makes one feel it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Desire is impossible; it destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one [...].
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Because desiring something is impossible, one must desire nothingness.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want is contradictory to the conditions or consequences attached to it [...].
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Contradiction alone is proof that we are not everything. Contradiction is our misery, and the feeling of our misery is the feeling of reality.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Our misery, we do not create it. It is real. That is why we must cherish it. All the rest is imaginary.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Impossibility is the door to the supernatural. One can only knock on it. It is another who opens.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One must touch the impossible to escape the dream. There is no impossibility in a dream. Only powerlessness.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The bonds that we cannot tie are the testimony of the transcendent.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The awareness of [...] impossibility forces us to continually desire to grasp the ungraspable through everything we desire, know, and want.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
When something seems impossible to obtain [...], it indicates an insurmountable limit at that level and the necessity of a change of level, of breaking through a ceiling.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Exhausting oneself in efforts at [one] level is degrading. It is better to accept the limit, to contemplate it and to savor all its bitterness.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
All particular motives are errors. The energy that is not supplied by any motive is the only good one [...].
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To do good. Whatever I do, I know with perfect clarity that it is not good. For he who is not good does not do good.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Good is the action one can perform while keeping one's attention [...] directed towards the pure and impossible good, without veiling by any lie [...] the impossibility of the pure good.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The limit is the law of the manifested world. God alone [...] is without limits.
1932-1942
Source: On science
Desire is unlimited in its object, and limited in its principle [...] by the fatigue that condemns it to death in advance.
1932-1942
Source: On science
Deliverance is to read the limit and the relation in all sensible appearances [...] as clearly and immediately as meaning in a printed text.
1932-1942
Source: On science
The meaning of a true science is to constitute a preparation for deliverance.
1932-1942
Source: On science
Equilibrium [...] is the essential notion of science; by this notion every change [...] is considered a rupture of equilibrium.
1932-1942
Source: On science
[...] it is absurd to believe science capable of unlimited progress. It is limited, like all human things [...].
1932-1942
Source: On science
[Science] is not an end [...] but a means for each man. The time has come not to seek to extend it, but to think it.
1932-1942
Source: On science
Man would be incapable of thinking [...] if he were not given images of equilibrium on his scale. This is not a necessity, but a grace [...].
1932-1942
Source: On science
Whatever part [...] one studies, one has understood something when one has defined an equilibrium, limits [...] and compensatory relationships [...].
1932-1942
Source: On science
The limit, which implies the notion of equilibrium, is the first law of the manifested world; hierarchy is the second.
1932-1942
Source: On science
Value judgments are always intuitive and admit of no proof; discursive reason only intervenes to define them and put them in order [...].
1932-1942
Source: On science
The knowledge of our imperfection as thinking beings is the most immediate knowledge; it is common to all men [...].
1932-1942
Source: On science
Man can and must conceive of the possibility of hierarchies of value not relative to human thought, but he cannot conceive of these hierarchies.
1932-1942
Source: On science
One can say that every phenomenon tends at once to extend itself, to degrade itself, and to elevate itself.
1932-1942
Source: On science
[...] there is something in non-living matter that allows it to be transformed into living matter.
1932-1942
Source: On science
The first need of the soul [...] is order, that is to say a fabric of social relations such that no one is forced to violate rigorous obligations in order to carry out other obligations.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
He for whom circumstances make [...] incompatible the actions ordered by several strict obligations [...] is wounded in his love of the good.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Whoever acts in such a way as to increase the incompatibility [between obligations] is a promoter of disorder. Whoever acts in such a way as to diminish it is a factor of order.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Whoever, in order to simplify problems, denies certain obligations, has concluded in his heart an alliance with crime.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
We love the beauty of the world because we feel behind it the presence of something analogous to the wisdom we would wish to possess to satisfy our desire for the good.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Truly beautiful works of art offer the example of wholes in which independent factors converge, in a way impossible to understand, to constitute a unique beauty.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The feeling of various obligations always proceeds from a desire for the good that is unique, fixed, identical to itself, for every human, from the cradle to the grave.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
This perpetually active desire [for the good] within us prevents us from ever resigning ourselves to situations where obligations are incompatible.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The contemplation [...] of the beauty of the world [...] can support us in the effort to think continually about the human order which must be our primary object.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
By looking at the world [...], we find encouragement [...] in considering how blind forces [...] are brought to converge into a unity, by something we do not understand, but which we call beauty.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If we constantly keep in mind the thought of a true human order [...], we will be in the situation of a man walking in the night, without a guide, but constantly thinking of the direction he wants to follow.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The first characteristic that distinguishes needs from desires [...] is that needs are limited [...]. Food brings satiety. The same is true for the nourishments of the soul.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Needs are arranged in pairs of opposites, and must be combined in a balance. Man needs food, but also an interval between meals; he needs warmth and coolness, rest and exercise.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
What is called the happy medium actually consists in satisfying neither of the contrary needs. It is a caricature of the true balance.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Justice in Plato is a supernatural virtue.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Justice is a flight out of this world into the other [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
A flight is something entirely different from a search.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Flight is an action that occupies the entire soul: when one is afraid, one forgets everything, even loved ones.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
If one flees simply in thought, in imagination, one falls into the hands of the enemy.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
What is called [...] geometry, is the assimilation of numbers that are not naturally similar [...]. For anyone who can understand, this is a marvel not of human, but of divine origin.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
God and man are numbers not naturally similar!
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The perfectly just man is a mediator.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The idea of mediation is everywhere in Plato [...] always linked to the idea of imitation [...] and to the idea of suffering.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The mediator is a being whom one follows, whom one imitates, who teaches and [...] a suffering being.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[Assimilation to God] is its own reward. No external sanctions.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Justice is contact with God, injustice is separation from God.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Justice is a flight [...] that implies abandonment, that also implies being pushed.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Whoever suffers seeks to communicate their suffering—either by mistreating others, or by provoking pity—in order to diminish it, and in this way, they truly do diminish it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The one who is at the very bottom, whom no one pities, who has the power to mistreat no one [...], their suffering remains within them and poisons them.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Impossible to forgive someone who has harmed us, if that harm diminishes us. We must think that it has not diminished us, but has revealed our true level.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The desire to see others suffer exactly what one suffers. This is why [...] the grudges of the wretched are directed at their own kind.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One has filled a void in oneself by creating one in another.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The desire for revenge is a desire for essential balance. One must seek balance on another plane.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The search for balance is bad because it is imaginary. Revenge [...] is, in a sense, imaginary.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To have the strength to contemplate misfortune when one is unfortunate, one needs supernatural bread.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The mechanism by which a too-difficult situation demeans is that the energy supplied by higher feelings is [...] limited; if the situation requires one to go further [...], one must resort to lower feelings [...] which are richer in energy.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The tragedy of those who, moved by love of the good onto a path where there is suffering, reach their limit after a certain time and become debased.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Base feelings (envy, resentment) are degraded energy.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Self-satisfaction after a good deed [...] is a degradation of higher energy. This is why the right hand must ignore...
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Men owe us what we imagine they will give us. To cancel this debt. To accept that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate God's renunciation.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I too am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Descent, the condition for ascent. Heaven descending to earth raises the earth to heaven.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To lower when one wants to raise. It is in the same way that 'he who humbles himself will be exalted'.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
There is [...] a necessity and laws in the domain of grace.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
There is [...] even less arbitrariness and chance in spiritual things, though they are free.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
A growing number thinks it is approaching infinity. It is moving away from it. One must lower oneself to rise.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Human misery contains the secret of divine wisdom, not pleasure.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Any search for pleasure [...] gives us nothing, except the experience that it is vain.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Only the contemplation of our limits and our misery places us on a higher plane.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The upward movement in us is vain [...] if it does not proceed from a downward movement.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Do not judge. [...] Let all beings come to you, and let them judge themselves. Be a balance.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One will not be judged then, having become an image of the true judge who does not judge.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
When the entire universe weighs upon us, there is no other possible counterweight than God himself.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Evil is infinite in the sense of the indeterminate [...]. Over this kind of infinity, only the true infinite prevails.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The cross is a balance where a frail and light body, which was God, lifted the weight of the entire world.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The fulcrum [to move the world] is the cross. [...] It must be at the intersection of the world and that which is not the world.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
There are men [...] profoundly internationalist in peacetime, because they know that justice has no nationality.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
As everyone believes themselves sufficiently capable of justice, they also believe that a system in which they were powerful would be just enough. [...] Men continually succumb to this.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The State had ceased to be [...] a good to be served with devotion. Instead, it had become in everyone's eyes an unlimited good to be consumed.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There is only one remedy. To give the French something to love. And to give them, first of all, France to love.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The heart of the contradiction inherent in patriotism is that the homeland is a limited thing whose demand is unlimited.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Never in this universe is there an equality of scale between an obligation and its object. The obligation is an infinite, the object is not.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is only through the things and beings of this world that human love can pierce through to that which dwells behind.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
We must accept the situation that is given to us, which subjects us to absolute obligations towards things that are relative, limited, and imperfect.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There can be exchange only if each preserves their own genius, and that is not possible without freedom.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Pacifism is only likely to do harm through the confusion between two repugnances: the repugnance to kill and the repugnance to die. The first is honorable, but very weak; the second, almost shameful, but very strong.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Those who do not want to defend their homeland should lose, not their life or their liberty, but purely and simply their homeland.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Hope alone, even if there were nothing else, is worth dying to preserve.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Compassion for fragility is always linked to the love of true beauty, because we feel acutely that truly beautiful things should be assured of an eternal existence and are not.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Whereas the pride of national greatness is by nature exclusive, non-transferable, compassion is by nature universal.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If the homeland is presented [to the people] as something beautiful and precious, [...] fragile, exposed to misfortune, which must be cherished and preserved, they will rightly feel closer to it than the other social classes.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
In the realm of suffering, affliction is a thing apart, specific, irreducible. It is something completely different from simple suffering.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The great enigma of human life is not suffering, but affliction.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Compassion for the afflicted is an impossibility. When it truly occurs, it is a miracle more surprising than walking on water [...].
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Affliction makes God absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than the light in a completely dark dungeon.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The soul must continue to love in a void, or at least to want to love, even with an infinitesimal part of itself. Then one day God comes to show himself to it.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
All the contempt, all the revulsion, all the hatred that our reason attaches to crime, our sensibility attaches to affliction.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
In anyone who has been afflicted for long enough, there is a complicity with their own affliction.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
God created out of love, for love. God did not create anything other than love itself and the means of love.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Sin is not a distance [from God]. It is a wrong orientation of the gaze.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Affliction is above all anonymous; it deprives those it takes of their personality and turns them into things.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Lovers, friends, have two desires. One is to love each other so much that they enter into one another and become a single being. The other is to love each other so much that, with half the globe between them, their union suffers no lessening.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The only choice offered to man [...] is to desire obedience or not to desire it. If he does not desire it, he nevertheless obeys, [...] as a thing subject to mechanical necessity.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
In the beauty of the world, brute necessity becomes an object of love. Nothing is as beautiful as gravity in the fleeting folds of the sea's undulations or the almost eternal folds of the mountains.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Every time we suffer a pain, we can tell ourselves that it is the beauty of the world, the obedience of creation to God, that is entering our body.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
One must only know that love is an orientation and not a state of soul. If one ignores this, one falls into despair at the first touch of affliction.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
It is not up to us to believe in God, but only not to give our love to false gods.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The future is made of the same substance as the present.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
We know very well that what we have [...] is not enough to satisfy us. But we believe that the day we have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe this because we lie to ourselves.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
It is enough not to lie to oneself to know that there is nothing here below for which one can live.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
It is enough to imagine all one's desires satisfied. After some time, one would be unsatisfied. One would want something else, and would be unhappy not to know what to want.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Life as it is made for humans is bearable only through lies. Those who refuse the lie [...] end up receiving from the outside [...] something that allows them to accept life as it is.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Evil is neither suffering nor sin, it is both at the same time [...] for they are linked, sin causes suffering and suffering makes one evil [...].
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The evil that is in us, we transfer a part of it onto the objects of our attention and our desire. And they send it back to us as if this evil came from them.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
If through attention and desire we transfer a part of our evil onto something perfectly pure, it cannot be soiled by it; it remains pure; it does not send this evil back to us; thus we are delivered from it.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
That which is perfectly pure cannot be anything other than God present here below.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
In the soul where a contact with purity has occurred, all the horror of the evil it carries within itself changes into love for divine purity.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Gravity, which entirely governs the movements of matter on earth, is the image of the carnal attachment that governs the tendencies of our soul.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
This solar energy, we cannot go and seek it, we can only receive it. It is what descends. [...] It is the image of grace.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
We can make no other effort towards the good than to dispose our soul to receive grace, and the energy necessary for this effort is provided to us by grace.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Monotony is bearable for man only through a divine illumination. But for this very reason, a monotonous life is much more favorable to salvation.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
My friend, I did not want this. [...] you are going to perish, it is I who kill you, and I live on.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
My friend, what are you doing now? You called to me walking towards death. Perhaps at this moment you are calling me.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
This power I had, pity made me relinquish it, I placed it in your hands, and received in exchange, alas, only a word.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Ah! must you not give me pity for pity, preserve what I love, when you have promised it?
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
If you believe you must punish [...], ah! kill me, me alone, let my friends live.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
The whole world will know through me, do not forget, how [power] understands the sanctity of a promise.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Alas! I am nothing, and all is deaf around me.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Distress has made my reason succumb. Forgive me, for it is you who make me fall so low.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
I have rights over you; remember that I have your word; I am your savior. No, no, forgive me, I irritate you; I will silence all that [...], my tears only, the only right left to the wretched.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
As soon as I fall silent, my ruin will be complete.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Once I was heard, [...] I myself was a man. And now, like a beast, in my greatest need my voice is not understood.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
What I am now, perhaps I have always been.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Death will lay my soul bare. God, my soul needs the flesh to hide its shame.
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Who will want to take in a traitor, since those whom my treason has saved will cast me out?
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Day that comes so beautifully, a smile suddenly suspended over my city [...], how sweet it is for humans who receive your peace to see the day!
1968
Source: Poems, followed by Venice Saved
Before June, the factories operated under a reign of terror. This terror fatally led employers, even the best of them, to easy solutions.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The entire organization of labor was designed to appeal, among the workers, to the basest motives: fear, [...] the obsession with pennies, jealousy among comrades.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The June movement was above all a reaction of relaxation [...]. Fear, jealousy, and the race for bonuses have largely disappeared.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The class struggle is not simply a function of interests; the way it unfolds depends largely on the state of mind that prevails in a given social environment.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
[...] the pace of work has lost its obsessive character; workers tend to return to the natural rhythm of work. [...] this is undeniably a moral progress.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The foremen, accustomed to commanding brutally and who [...] had almost never needed to persuade, found themselves completely disoriented.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The disaffection of technicians towards the labor movement is [...] one of the main causes that led employers to regain confidence in their own strength.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Such an experience decisively changes the balance of power.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
[The power of the delegates] has [...] created a certain separation between them and the rank-and-file workers; on their part, camaraderie is mixed with a very clear nuance of condescension.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
[The delegates] naturally come to dominate the union. They can [...] provoke clashes, conflicts, walkouts, and almost strikes.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
If employers saw fit to establish [...] a work regime such that any moral progress of the working class would inevitably disrupt production, they bear full responsibility for it.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
[The union organization], if it is not responsible for the past, is responsible for the future because of the power it has acquired.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Before June, there was [...] an order [...] founded on slavery. Slavery has disappeared [...]; the order linked to slavery disappeared with it. [...] But industry cannot live without order.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The question therefore arises of a new order, compatible with the newly acquired freedoms, with the renewed sense of workers' dignity and camaraderie.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
It is not even in the moral interest of the working class for workers to feel irresponsible in the performance of their work.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Wretch who understands nothing, who knows nothing. Come with me and I will teach you things you do not suspect.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
Fall to your knees before this place with love, as before the place where truth exists.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
It was no longer winter. It was not yet spring. The branches of the trees were bare, without buds, in a cold air full of sun.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
This bread truly had the taste of bread. I have never found that taste again.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
The wine [...] had the taste of the sun and of the earth on which this city was built.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
He had promised me a teaching, but he taught me nothing. We would talk about all sorts of things, rambling on, as old friends do.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
One day he told me: 'Now go.' [...] I went down it knowing nothing, my heart as if in pieces.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
I realized that I had no idea where that house was. I have never tried to find it again.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
I understood that he had come to get me by mistake.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
My place is not in that attic. It is anywhere.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
How can I know if I remember exactly? He is not here to tell me.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
I know very well that he does not love me. How could he love me? And yet deep inside me [...] a point of myself, cannot help but think [...] that perhaps, despite everything, he loves me.
1942
Source: Supernatural Knowledge
We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. [...] Our notion of justice exempts the one who possesses from giving.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Only the absolute identification of justice and love makes possible at once [...] compassion and gratitude, [and] respect for the dignity of misfortune.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The supernatural virtue of justice consists, if one is the superior in an unequal power dynamic, in behaving exactly as if there were equality.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
He who treats as equals those whom the balance of power places far beneath him truly gives them the gift of the human quality of which fate deprived them.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The existence of evil here on earth, far from being proof against the reality of God, is what reveals that reality to us in its truth.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Creation on God's part is an act not of self-expansion, but of withdrawal, of renunciation.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
God denied himself in our favor to give us the possibility of denying ourselves for him. This response [...] is the only possible justification for the madness of love that is the creative act.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Charity, when it is not supernatural, is like a commercial transaction. It buys the unfortunate person.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The sympathy of the strong for the weak [...] is against nature.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Creative attention consists in paying real attention to something that does not exist.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
If someone wants to make himself invisible, there is no surer way than to become poor.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
In true love, it is not we who love the unfortunate in God; it is God in us who loves the unfortunate.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Men believe they despise crime, but in reality they despise the weakness of misfortune.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
There is only one way to never receive anything but good. It is to know [...] that men who are not animated by pure charity are cogs in the world order in the manner of inert matter.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Bread and stone come from Christ and, penetrating into our being, bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The object of the true crime of idolatry is always something analogous to the State. It is this crime that the devil proposed to Christ when offering him the kingdoms of this world. Christ refused. Richelieu accepted.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Literature is only of interest as a sign, but it is a sign that does not deceive.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The loss of the past, whether collective or individual, is the great human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away like a child tearing up a rose.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The development of the State exhausts the country. The State eats the country's moral substance, lives on it, fattens itself on it, until the food runs out, which reduces it to languor through starvation.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
We have lived this paradox, so strange that one could not even be aware of it: a democracy where all public institutions [...] were openly hated and despised by the entire population.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
An idolatry without love, what could be more monstrous and sadder?
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Basically, there is nothing more mixed into common and daily human life than philosophy, but an implicit philosophy.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
To posit the fatherland as an absolute that evil cannot defile is a glaring absurdity. The fatherland is a fact, and a fact is not an absolute.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Plato represents the collectivity as something animalistic that prevents the salvation of the soul.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If it is prescribed to hate [one's family], in a certain sense of the word hate, it is certainly forbidden to love one's country, in a certain sense of the word love. For the proper object of love is the good, and 'God alone is good'.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
In supreme moments [...] those whose inner life proceeds entirely from a single idea are the only ones who resist. This is why totalitarian systems form men who can withstand anything.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Never in this universe is there an equality of dimension between an obligation and its object. The obligation is an infinite, the object is not.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
We must accept the situation that is made for us, which subjects us to absolute obligations towards things that are relative, limited, and imperfect.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
When one assumes, as France did in 1789, the function of thinking for the universe, of defining justice for it, one does not become the owner of human flesh.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Give the French something to love. And first give them France to love. Conceive the reality corresponding to the name of France in such a way that as it is, in its truth, it can be loved with the whole soul.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A doctrine is not enough for anything, but it is essential to have one, if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Fundamental truths are simple. The difficulty is in the application.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
When a man wants something he cannot name, it is very easy to make him believe he wants something else, and to divert the treasure of his energy toward something indifferent or evil.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Peace has no prestige or poetry. Justice does.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The only source of salvation and greatness [...] is to rediscover one's genius in the depths of one's misfortune.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
What is sacred in man is the aptitude for the impersonal, the faculty of passing into the impersonal.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
We need a collective life which, while surrounding each human being with warmth, leaves space and silence around them.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Christ did not say: 'I am orthodoxy.' He said: 'I am the truth.'
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
History is based on documentation, that is, on the testimony of the murderers concerning their victims.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Science is an effort to perceive the order of the universe. [...] It is a contact of human thought with eternal wisdom. It is something like a sacrament.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
What is culture? The training of attention.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Joy is an essential need of the soul. The lack of joy [...] is a state of sickness in which intelligence, courage, and generosity are extinguished.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Man cannot take himself as his own goal. If he tries, he falls into the search for immediate pleasure, indifference, boredom. He needs a goal outside of himself.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
In art, everything that evokes human misery in its truth is infinitely touching and beautiful.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Misfortune is only relieved by a miracle.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The love of the order of the world, of the beauty of the world, is [...] the complement of the love of our neighbor.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
We are in unreality, in a dream. To renounce our imaginary central position [...] is to awaken to the real, to the eternal, to see the true light, to hear the true silence.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted, and soiled, remains invincibly in the heart of man as a powerful motivation.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The beauty of the world is the entrance to the labyrinth. [...] if he continues walking, he is quite sure to arrive finally at the center. And there, God is waiting to eat him.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The beauty of the world is the cooperation of divine Wisdom in creation. [...] The beauty of the world is Christ's tender smile for us through matter.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The great sorrow of human life is that looking and eating are two different operations.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
"Two winged companions, says an Upanishad, two birds are on a tree branch. One eats the fruit, the other watches it." These two birds are the two parts of our soul.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Beauty is the only finality here below. As Kant said very well, it is a finality that contains no end.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Art is an attempt to transport into a finite quantity of matter modeled by man an image of the infinite beauty of the entire universe.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The desire to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the desire for the Incarnation. It is by mistake that it believes itself to be something else.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Everything that has some relation to beauty must be withdrawn from the course of time. Beauty is eternity here below.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Whenever a man rises to a degree of excellence [...], something impersonal, anonymous, appears in him. His voice is enveloped in silence.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it resists love. It is the one God has given us to love. He wanted it to be difficult and yet possible to love it.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Misfortune is uprootedness.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
To destroy cities [...] or to exclude human beings from the city [...], is to cut every tie of poetry and love between human souls and the universe. [...] There is hardly a greater crime.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
This experience [...] has changed for me not this or that idea [...], but infinitely more, my whole perspective on things, the very feeling I have of life.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
One degrades the inexpressible by wanting to express it.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Attention, deprived of objects worthy of it, is [...] forced to concentrate second by second on a petty problem, always the same [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
When I think that the great leaders [...] claimed to create a free working class and that none of them [...] had the faintest idea of the real conditions that determine servitude [...], politics seems to me a sinister joke.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The most difficult temptation to resist, in such a life, is that of giving up thinking altogether: one feels so clearly that it is the only way to stop suffering!
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
To do one's work with irritation would be to do it badly, and condemn oneself to starve; and there is no one to attack besides the work itself.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The worst thing a human being can do to you in the world is to inflict sufferings that break your vitality and consequently your capacity for work.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
I suffered a lot from these months of slavery, but I wouldn't have missed them for the world. They allowed me [...] to experience firsthand everything I had only been able to imagine.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Life sells the progress it brings dearly. Almost always at the price of intolerable pain.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
A factory must be [...] a place where one collides harshly, painfully, but still joyfully with real life. Not this dreary place where one only obeys [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
All the external reasons [...] on which my sense of dignity, my self-respect, were based, have been [...] radically shattered by the blow of a brutal and daily constraint.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
It seemed to me that I was born to wait, to receive, to execute orders [...]. This is the kind of suffering no worker talks about: it hurts too much even to think about it.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Slowly, in suffering, I reconquered through slavery the feeling of my dignity as a human being, a feeling that was not based on anything external this time [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
One must, standing before one's machine, kill one's soul for 8 hours a day, one's thoughts, one's feelings, everything.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
This situation causes thought to shrivel up, to retract, like flesh retracts from a scalpel. One cannot be 'conscious'.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Whoever takes up the sword will perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword [...] will perish on the cross.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' Therein lies the true proof that Christianity is something divine.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To be just, one must be naked and dead. Without imagination.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One cannot desire the cross. One could desire any degree of asceticism or heroism, but not the cross, which is penal suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The secret of our kinship with God must be sought in our mortality.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
God exhausts himself [...] to reach the soul and seduce it. [...] And when it has become entirely his, he abandons it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To resemble God, but God crucified.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
It is the bringing together of the human and the divine that calls for punishment.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The mutual love of God and man is suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
For us to feel the distance between us and God, God must be a crucified slave. For we only feel distance downwards.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
For love to be as great as possible, the distance is as great as possible.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Justice is essentially non-acting. It must be either transcendent or suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
From human misery to God. But not as compensation or consolation. As a correlation.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
By emptying oneself, one is exposed to the full pressure of the surrounding universe.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One must [...] absolutely love everything, as a whole and in every detail, including evil in all its forms.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
One of the most dangerous forms of sin [...] consists in placing the unlimited within an essentially finite domain.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
God rewards the soul that thinks of Him with attention and love [...] by exercising over it a constraint [...] proportional to that attention and love.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The social feeling is deceptively similar to the religious feeling. It resembles it as a false diamond resembles a true one.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
If I do not love them as they are, it is not them that I love, and my love is not true.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
One does not give oneself love by one's own will.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It is not my business to think of myself. My business is to think of God. It is for God to think of me.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The flesh pushes one to say 'I' and the devil pushes one to say 'we'.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It is prescribed for me to be alone, a stranger, and in exile with respect to any human environment without exception.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
If I had my eternal salvation placed before me on this table [...] I would not reach out my hand to take it as long as I did not think I had been ordered to do so.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
To have been at Christ's side [...] during the crucifixion seems to me a far more enviable privilege than to be at his right hand in his glory.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Any human being [...] enters this kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he desires truth and perpetually makes an effort of attention to attain it.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Christ loves for us to prefer truth to him, for before being Christ, he is truth. If we turn away from him to go toward the truth, we will not go far without falling into his arms.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It is in misfortune itself that the mercy of God shines. Deep down, at the center of its inconsolable bitterness.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The joy of learning is as indispensable to studies as breathing is to runners.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
One must accomplish the possible to touch the impossible.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Precepts are not given to be practiced, but practice is prescribed for the understanding of precepts. They are scales.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Only things related to inspiration are nourished by delay. Those related to natural duty, to the will, cannot suffer delay.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
At every involuntary thought of pride one catches in oneself, turn [...] the full gaze of attention to the memory of a humiliation [...], the most bitter, the most intolerable possible.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One must not try to change within oneself or erase desires and aversions, pleasures and pains. One must undergo them passively, like sensations of color, and without giving them more credit.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
[One must] compel oneself by violence to act as if one did not have such a desire, such an aversion, without trying to persuade the sensibility, but by forcing it to obey.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I must practice transforming the feeling of effort into a passive feeling of suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Inspirations that distract from the fulfillment of easy and lowly obligations come from the wrong side.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Duty is given to us to kill the self.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One must perform one's duty at the prescribed time to believe in the reality of the external world. One must believe in the reality of time. Otherwise, one is dreaming.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
If [my flaw] is so great as to rob me of the possibility of erasing it [...], it must be accepted like everything that is, with an acceptance accompanied by love.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
There is no other perfect criterion for good and evil than uninterrupted inner prayer.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Hope is the knowledge that the evil one carries within oneself is finite and that the slightest orientation of the soul towards good [...] abolishes a little of it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Infallibly, good produces good and evil produces evil in the realm of the purely spiritual.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
In the natural realm (including the psychological), good and evil produce each other.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
...an analysis of political and social oppression, of its permanent causes, its mechanism, its current forms.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
I very much regret now not having published it. I first wanted to rewrite it because of the imperfection of its form...
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
I have always thought that one day I would leave like this.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
...the torment that never left [the author]: the torment of injustice.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Since Marx [...], political and social thought had produced nothing more penetrating or more prophetic in the West.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Your work is of the first magnitude; it demands a sequel.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
All concepts must be re-examined, and the entire social analysis must be redone.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Your example will give courage to generations disappointed by ontology or ideology.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The reader will make the application himself; the risks are his.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Critique must be flawless and unanswerable.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The most serious mistake [...] would be to confuse matter and form. The object can never bear the proof.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Such new work [...] must guard against any appearance of polemic.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[Works of analysis] are the only ones that open up the near future and the true Revolution...
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
...indignation alone is capable of diverting you from your mission.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Remember what I said: that which is misanthropic is false.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
There is no man so strong, so proud, so impetuous, who is not tamed when he has been made to truly feel that he is powerless.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
[...] reason of State did not permit them to observe the oath [...].
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
I have never lived, since I have not governed.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
No, it is not possible, one must live before one dies.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Thus death will suddenly seize the unsatisfied soul.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The just heaven punishes those who despise their oath. If heaven does nothing, I, I will know how to punish them.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
My tears only, the sole right that remains for the wretched.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Alas! I am nothing, and all around me is deaf.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
As soon as I fall silent, my ruin will be complete.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
What I am now, perhaps I have always been.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
There is no gaze before which I do not have to tremble.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
God, my soul needs the flesh to hide its shame, the flesh that eats and sleeps, without future and without past.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
I am tired of keeping my eyes downcast. If I want to die, my heart fails me.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
My God, I can neither die nor live. My only crime is to have had pity.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
At last, it is over. I would like to sleep now.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Until recent times, all those who felt the need to support their revolutionary feelings with precise concepts found or believed they found these concepts in Marx.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
Marx gives an admirable account of the mechanism of capitalist oppression; but he accounts for it so well that it is hard to imagine how this mechanism could ever cease to function.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
As long as there is a struggle for power on the surface of the globe, and as long as the decisive factor for victory is industrial production, the workers will be exploited.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The power that the bourgeoisie possesses to exploit and oppress the workers resides in the very foundations of our social life, and cannot be annihilated by any political or legal transformation.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The complete subordination of the worker to the enterprise [...] rests on the structure of the factory and not on the system of ownership.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
Our entire civilization is based on specialization, which implies the subjugation of those who execute to those who coordinate; and on such a basis, one can only organize and perfect oppression, not alleviate it.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The task of revolutions consists essentially in the emancipation not of men but of the forces of production.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
To believe that our will converges with a mysterious will at work in the world that helps us to vanquish is to think religiously, it is to believe in Providence.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
All religions make man a mere instrument of Providence, and socialism too places men at the service of historical progress, that is to say, the progress of production.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The materialist method, this instrument bequeathed to us by Marx, is a virgin instrument; no Marxist has ever truly used it, starting with Marx himself.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
Our so-called scientific culture has given us this disastrous habit of generalizing, of extrapolating arbitrarily, instead of studying the conditions of a phenomenon and the limits they imply.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
It is solely the intoxication produced by the rapidity of technical progress that has given birth to the mad idea that work could one day become superfluous.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The word 'revolution' is a word for which people kill, for which they die, for which they send the masses to their death, but which has no content.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
This inevitable constraint only deserves to be called oppression insofar as [...] it places the latter at the mercy of the former and thus brings the pressure of those who command to bear [...] on those who execute.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
The problem is therefore quite clear; it is a matter of knowing whether one can conceive of an organization of production which [...] would at least allow them to be exercised without crushing spirits and bodies under oppression.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty/05
Not to understand new things, but through patience, effort, and method, to come to understand the obvious truths with one's whole self.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The most commonplace truth, when it pervades the whole soul, is like a revelation.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Try to remedy faults by attention and not by will.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
If one turns intelligence towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul is not drawn to it in spite of itself.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The amount of creative genius in an era is strictly proportional to the amount of extreme attention, and therefore of authentic religion, in that era.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Only effort without desire [...] unfailingly contains a reward.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Attention is linked to desire. Not to will, but to desire. Or, more exactly, to consent.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The ability to banish a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on reality. So does the act of love.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Method for understanding images, symbols [...]. Do not try to interpret them, but look at them until light bursts forth.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Our desires are infinite in their claims, but limited by the energy from which they proceed.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The knowledge of human misery is difficult for the rich [...] because he is almost invincibly led to believe that he is something.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Purity is the power to contemplate defilement.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Extreme purity can contemplate both the pure and the impure; impurity can contemplate neither: the first frightens it, the second absorbs it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
We are a part that must imitate the whole.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Everything that is less than the universe is subject to suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
May the entire universe be to me, in relation to my body, what a blind man's stick is to his hand.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One does not detach, one changes attachment. To attach oneself to everything.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
May all suffering make the universe enter the body.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Through each sensation, to feel the universe. What does it matter then if it is pleasure or pain?
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Two limit-tendencies: to destroy the self for the benefit of the universe or to destroy the universe for the benefit of the self.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To love one's neighbor as oneself does not mean to love all beings equally, for I do not equally love all the modes of my own existence.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To not accept an event in the world is to desire that the world not be.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To desire that the world not be, is to desire that I, as I am, be everything.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
This irreducible 'I' which is the irreducible foundation of my suffering, to make it universal.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Everything I desire exists, or has existed, or will exist somewhere. [...] Hence, how can one not be fulfilled?
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I can defile the entire universe with my misery and not feel it, or gather it within myself.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To bear the discord between imagination and fact. 'I am suffering.' This is better than 'this landscape is ugly'.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Not to want to change one's own weight in the balance of the world — the golden scales of Zeus.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
We have lost the idea that absolute certainty is fitting only for divine things. We want certainty for material things. For things that concern God, belief is enough for us.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Our intelligence has become so coarse that we no longer even conceive that there can be authentic, rigorous certainty concerning incomprehensible mysteries.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Technical applications are [...] among those things which are obtained only as a bonus and which are never found if they are sought directly.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
One must enter through these holes [beauty, misfortune, pure science], not through the solid parts.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Harmony is [...] the unity of opposites.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
If one thinks of God only as one, one thinks of him either as a thing [...] or as a subject, and then [...] he needs an object, so that creation would be a necessity and not love.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
One must recognize that nothing in the world is the center of the world, that the center of the world is outside the world, that no one here below has the right to say 'I'.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
God alone has the right to say 'I am'; 'I am' is his name and is the name of no other being.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Nothing is more contrary to friendship than solidarity [...]. Thoughts that [...] contain the first person plural are infinitely further from justice than those that contain the first person singular.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Reality for the human mind is nothing other than contact with necessity. [...] the feeling of reality constitutes a harmony and a mystery.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Necessity is an enemy for man as long as he thinks in the first person.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
To be free, for us, is nothing other than to desire to obey God. All other freedom is a lie.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
This entire universe is empty of purpose. The soul which, because it is torn by misfortune, continually cries out for this purpose, touches this void.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
If [the soul] does not renounce love, it happens one day that it hears [...] silence itself as something infinitely more full of meaning than any answer, as the very word of God.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
God is mediation, and all mediation is God. One cannot pass from nothing to nothing without passing through God. God is the only way. He is the path.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
I wondered with concern how I would manage to bring myself to write while submitting to imposed limits [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[I remembered] an old project that I hold dear to my heart, that of making the masterpieces of Greek poetry [...] accessible to the popular masses.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
I felt [...] that great Greek poetry would be a hundred times closer to the people, if they could know it, than classical and modern French literature.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
If I have succeeded in my design, it should be able to interest and touch everyone—from the director to the last laborer.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[The reader] must be able to enter into it almost on level ground, and yet without ever feeling any condescension [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[...] without ever feeling [...] any effort made to bring it within their reach.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
This is how I understand popularization.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
It seemed that these texts, thus brought together, allowed one to grasp [...] what the spirit of Greece is for Simone Weil [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
'Through suffering, knowledge' is the sovereign law He has laid down.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
It distills in sleep, near the heart, the pain that is sorrowful memory, and even to those who do not want it, wisdom comes.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
This violence is a grace on the part of the divinities [...].
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
He cannot be reached, unlike the false gods.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
One can only turn one's thoughts towards Him, and that is enough to obtain perfection.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
The 'pain that is sorrowful memory' signifies [...] the premonition of eternal felicity, of the soul's divine destiny.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
This premonition distills drop by drop in the sleep of unconsciousness [...].
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
By the time one becomes aware of it, one is already seized by grace, and all that remains is to consent.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
I have nothing to compare, after having weighed everything, [...] if the vain weight of anguish is to be truly cast off.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
Whoever, with their thoughts turned toward [God], declares His glory, that person will receive the fullness of wisdom.
1951
Source: Pre-Christian Intuitions
The world above the heavens, no poet will ever sing of it worthily... For that which is without color, without form, [...] reality as it truly is, can only be contemplated by the spirit.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Through contemplation, [the soul] is nourished by truth, and it is happy.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
In the circular movement, [the soul] sees justice itself face to face, it sees reason, it sees knowledge.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[One must seek] knowledge in the reality of its true essence, not that which is subject to generation.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Of justice, of reason, and of other spiritual values, no splendor is to be found in their images here below.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Through obscure instruments, with great difficulty, a small number of men going towards their images perceive the essence of the model.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
We grasp [beauty] itself in its manifest splendor, through the clearest of our senses, to which wisdom is not visible.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[Wisdom] would arouse terrible loves if it produced a manifest image of itself that could enter our sight.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Beauty alone has this destiny: to be perfectly manifest and perfectly worthy of love.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
In everything that is purely, perfectly, and authentically beautiful here below, there is a real presence of God.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
As for the other true realities, the soul contemplates them and consumes them... then it returns to its home.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Reality as it truly is [...] can only be contemplated by the guide of the soul, by the spirit.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Desire, oriented towards God, is the only force capable of raising the soul. Or rather, it is God alone who comes to seize the soul and lift it, but desire alone compels God to descend.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Twenty minutes of intense, unfatigued attention are infinitely better than three hours of that frowning application which makes one say, with the feeling of a duty accomplished: 'I have worked well.'
1942
Source: Waiting For God
There is something in our soul that recoils from true attention much more violently than the flesh recoils from fatigue. This something is much closer to evil than the flesh is.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Attention consists of suspending one's thought, leaving it available, empty, and penetrable to the object [...]. Thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The most precious goods should not be sought, but awaited. For man cannot find them by his own powers, and if he sets out in search of them, he will find in their place false goods whose falsity he will not be able to discern.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The fullness of love for one's neighbor is simply to be able to ask them: 'What is your torment?'
1942
Source: Waiting For God
This gaze is first of all an attentive gaze, where the soul empties itself of all its own content to receive into itself the being it looks at as he is, in all his truth. Only one who is capable of attention is capable of this.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The great enigma of human life is not suffering, it is affliction. [...] it is astonishing that God has given affliction the power to seize the very soul of the innocent and take possession of it as a sovereign master.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Affliction makes God absent for a time, more absent than a dead person [...]. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, the absence of God becomes definitive.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Evil dwells in the soul of the criminal without being felt there. It is felt in the soul of the innocent afflicted person.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Lovers, friends have two desires. One to love each other so much that they enter into one another and become a single being. The other to love each other so much that having half the globe between them does not diminish their union in any way.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Creation on God's part is an act not of self-expansion, but of withdrawal, of renunciation. God and all creatures is less than God alone. God has accepted this diminution.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The beauty of the world is the entrance to the labyrinth. [...] it is quite certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there, God is waiting to eat him.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
The great sorrow of human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only on the other side of heaven, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
In true love, it is not we who love the afflicted in God, it is God in us who loves the afflicted.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
There is a reality located outside the world, that is, outside of space and time, outside of man's mental universe, outside of the entire domain that human faculties can reach.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
To this reality corresponds, in the center of the human heart, this demand for an absolute good which always dwells there and never finds any object in this world.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so the other reality is the sole foundation of good.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
All human beings are absolutely identical insofar as they can be conceived as constituted by a central demand for good around which psychic and carnal matter is arranged.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Respect can find no kind of direct expression here below. If it is not expressed, it has no existence.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
For respect [...] there is only one possibility of indirect expression, which is provided by the needs of men in this world, the earthly needs of the soul and the body.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
To each need corresponds an obligation. To each obligation corresponds a need. There is no other kind of obligation related to human things.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The needs of a human being are sacred. Their satisfaction cannot be subordinated either to reasons of state, or to any consideration of money, nationality, race, or color [...].
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The human soul needs equality and hierarchy.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The human soul needs consented obedience and freedom.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The need for truth demands [...] the absolute prohibition of all propaganda without exception.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The existence of a social class defined by the lack of personal and collective property is as shameful as slavery.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The human soul needs security and risk. Fear [...] is a sickness of the soul. The boredom caused by the absence of all risk is also a sickness of the soul.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Anything that has the effect of uprooting a human being or preventing them from taking root is criminal.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The criterion for recognizing that the needs of human beings are satisfied somewhere is a flourishing of fraternity, joy, beauty, and happiness.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Uprootedness is by far the most dangerous sickness of human societies, for it multiplies itself.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
He who is uprooted uproots. He who is rooted does not uproot.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It would be vain to turn away from the past to think only of the future. [...] The opposition between the future and the past is absurd.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
To give, one must possess, and we possess no other life, no other sap, than the treasures inherited from the past and digested, assimilated, and recreated by us.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Of all the needs of the human soul, there is none more vital than the past.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The destruction of the past is perhaps the greatest of all crimes.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Love of the past has nothing to do with a reactionary political orientation. [...] revolution draws all its sap from a tradition.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A social system is profoundly sick when a peasant works the land with the thought that he is a peasant because he was not intelligent enough to become a schoolteacher.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Unhappiness is a breeding-ground for false problems. It creates obsessions. The way to appease them is not to provide what they demand, but to eliminate the unhappiness.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
What makes our culture so difficult to communicate to the people is not that it is too high, but that it is too low.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Truth illuminates the soul in proportion to its purity, not to any kind of quantity. [...] A little pure truth is worth as much as a lot of pure truth.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The art of transposing truths is one of the most essential and least known. [...] What cannot be transposed is not a truth.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Uprootedness breeds idolatry.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The inclination of human nature is not to pay attention to the unhappy.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There is a certain relationship with time that is suitable for inert things, and another that is suitable for thinking creatures. It is wrong to confuse them.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
'Sovereignty resides in the nation.' No matter how you turn this sentence, I defy anyone to find any meaning in it.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
It is not desirable for the nation to be sovereign, but only for justice to be.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
'Justice is the sovereignty of sovereignty. That is why through justice the weak can reach the one who is very powerful, as if by a royal decree.'
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
What is in fact sovereign is force, which is always in the hands of a small fraction of the nation. What ought to be sovereign is justice.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
All political constitutions [...] have as their sole purpose—if they are legitimate—to prevent or at least limit the oppression to which force naturally tends.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
And when there is oppression, it is not the nation that is oppressed. It is a man, and a man, and a man. The nation does not exist; how could it be sovereign?
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
There can only be a judicial power if: 1. magistrates receive a spiritual training; 2. it is accepted that judgment in equity [...] is the normal form of judgment.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Any man who has the power to harass or deceive men must be obliged to make a commitment not to do so.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
It is one of the most stupid prejudices of our time to grant spiritual value to reputations based on narrowly specialized work [...].
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The total grip of political parties on public life is what has done us the most harm. It would be strange to officially enshrine it in the very text of the Constitution.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Human intelligence—even among the most intelligent—is miserably inadequate for the great problems of public life.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
To have to ask oneself when facing a political problem: 'What is the solution most in conformity with reason, justice, and the public good,' requires all the attention a human mind is capable of, and much more.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Conformity to the public good is not guaranteed by any mechanism. An intense and exclusive concern for the public good is its absolutely essential condition.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
A Constitution is solely intended to combine the provisions most likely to bring to power men who are concerned with the public good.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Instead of 'Political sovereignty resides in the nation,' I would propose 'Legitimacy is constituted by the free consent of the people to all the authorities to which they are subject.'
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Obedience is a vital need of the human soul.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Obedience [...] presupposes consent, not to each order received, but a consent given once and for all.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is necessary that [...] consent and not the fear of punishment or the lure of reward should in fact constitute the mainspring of obedience.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Submission must never be suspected of servility.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It must also be known that those who command are themselves obedient.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The entire hierarchy must be directed towards a goal whose value and even greatness is felt by all, from the highest to the lowest.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Obedience being a necessary food for the soul, whoever is definitively deprived of it is sick.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Any community governed by a sovereign leader who is accountable to no one finds itself in the hands of a sick person.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Where a man is placed for life at the head of the social organization, he must be a symbol and not a leader.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Those who subject human masses by constraint and cruelty deprive them of two vital nourishments at once: liberty and obedience.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is no longer in the power of these masses to give their inner consent to the authority they endure.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Those who foster a state of affairs where the lure of profit is the main motive take obedience away from men [...].
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The consent which is the principle [of obedience] is not something that can be sold.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A thousand signs show that the people of our time had long been starved of obedience. But this has been taken advantage of to give them slavery.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is against nature for the land to be cultivated by uprooted beings.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Nothing in the world can compensate for the loss of joy in work.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The depopulation of the countryside, taken to its limit, leads to social death.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The unhappy populations [...] need greatness even more than bread, and there are only two kinds of greatness: authentic greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old lie of world conquest.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Our era is so poisoned by lies that it turns everything it touches into a lie.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
If men are given the choice between butter and guns, [...] a mysterious fatality forces them against their will to choose the guns.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Beauty is something that is eaten; it is a food.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
When getting to the bottom of things, there is no true dignity that does not have a spiritual root and consequently a supernatural one.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
One can say many things about our misfortune, but not that it is undeserved.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The task of the people's school is to give more dignity to work by infusing it with thought, not to make the worker a compartmentalized thing who sometimes works and sometimes thinks.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Our era has for its own mission, for its vocation, the creation of a civilization founded on the spirituality of work.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is because we have not been equal to this great thing which was being born in us that we have thrown ourselves into the abyss of totalitarian systems.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is better to fail than to succeed in doing harm.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The idolatrous current of totalitarianism can only find an obstacle in an authentic spiritual life.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A civilization founded on a spirituality of work would be the highest degree of man's rootedness in the universe, and therefore the opposite of our present state, which consists of an almost total uprootedness.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
To perceive each human being [...] as a prison where a prisoner lives, with the whole universe around.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To recognize one's brother in a stranger, to recognize God in the universe.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To be continually ready to admit that another is something other than what one reads in them [...], perhaps something else entirely.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Every being cries out in silence to be read differently.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One reads, but one is also read by others. Interference of these readings.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To force someone to read themselves as you read them (slavery). To force others to read you as you read yourself (conquest).
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Charity and injustice are defined only by readings — and thus escape all definition.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Who can flatter themselves that they will read correctly?
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
What is the difference between the just and the unjust if everyone always acts in accordance with the justice they read?
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The cause of wrong readings: public opinion, passions.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
What hope does innocence have if it is not recognized?
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Reading — except for a certain quality of attention — obeys gravity.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Superimposed readings: to read necessity behind sensation, to read order behind necessity, to read God behind order.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Every judgment judges the one who makes it.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
One does not accept the testimony of the murderer against the victim.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
We take great care to always maintain around our souls the garment of carnal and social thoughts; if we were to cast it aside for a moment, we would have to die of shame.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Only a few perfect beings are dead and naked here below, while still alive.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
I have created the four winds so that every man might breathe like his brother [...] I have created every man like his brother.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
I have left no one hungry. I have caused fear to no one. I have made no one cry. [...] I have not been deaf to just and true words.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Supernatural compassion for human beings can only be a participation in the compassion of God, which is the Passion.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Now one can perhaps affirm that the entire terrestrial globe is uprooted and widowed of its past.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[Certain] prejudices infiltrated into the very substance of Christianity have uprooted Europe, cutting it off from its millennial past.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It was not against idolatry that Christ had launched the fire of his indignation, it was against the Pharisees [...]. 'You have taken away the key of knowledge.'
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[There is the] need for clothing, made of flesh and especially of collective warmth, which protects from the light the evil that each person carries within.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[There are] beings whom an excess of beauty and purity destines for misfortune.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Each time an invading people has submitted to the spirit of the place [...], there has been civilization. Each time it has preferred its proud ignorance, there has been barbarism.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[The Trojan War] was the original sin of the Greeks, their remorse. Through this remorse the executioners deserved to inherit in part the inspiration of their victims.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
To supernatural revelation [some] oppose a refusal, for they do not need a God who speaks to the soul in secret, but a God present to the collective.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Sacrifice is myself present in this body.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Not only humans, but inert matter itself obeys God freely and out of love. [...] It is a conception [...] that we have lost, and which, if it were present within us, would annihilate the harmful opposition between science and religion.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
A descending fire is against nature. Thus lightning is the image of the madness of love that compels God to a downward movement towards mankind.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Zeus, being on the point of creating, changed himself into Love; for by composing the order of the world from opposites, he led it to harmony and friendship [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[...] the mechanical necessity that determines matter [...] is an image of divine justice. Plato had preserved this thought. Our science has lost it, thus severing all ties with spiritual life.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Harmony is the unity of a mixture of many, and the single thought of separate thinkers.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Friendship is an equality made of harmony.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
All known things have a number. [...] For nothing can be thought or known without number.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
[...] the true meaning of primitive Greek mathematics, the foundation of our science, was religious.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The only alternative to this interpretation is to admit that the Greeks wrote incoherent things [...]. We have made the mistake of judging them by our own standards.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The reality of the sensible universe is constituted by a necessity whose laws are the symbolic expression of the mysteries of faith.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
The quantity of texts [...] today totally unintelligible contained in the New Testament manifestly shows that an infinitely precious part of Christian doctrine has disappeared.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
To neutralize a faith, there is no more admirable method than to begin by exterminating most of those who transmit it, and then to make it the official doctrine of an idolatrous state.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
If the gates of Hell have truly not prevailed, it can only mean that the true faith still lives in secret in the hearts of a few hidden beings. But very well hidden.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
It is extraordinary that the official adoption of Christianity by the Empire is presented as proof that the blood of the martyrs had triumphed [...], whereas, on the contrary, it is proof that the persecutions had succeeded to an unprecedented degree.
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Things that are similar and of the same kind have no need for harmony. Those that are not similar, nor of the same kind, nor of the same rank, must be kept under lock and key by a harmony [...].
1953
Source: The Greek Source
Thinking beings without exception tend to exercise all the power they possibly can. This [...] is the law of thinking beings, as gravity is the law of matter.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The victor lives his own dream, the vanquished lives the dream of another.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Pity has never stopped anyone. It is a superficial emotion of the sensibility that [...] never penetrates to the depths of the soul.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Those who claim to have been stopped in an action by pity use that word to disguise their fear.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Men of action and enterprise are dreamers; they prefer the dream to reality. But, by force of arms, they compel others to dream their dreams.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
One loves the one on whom one is absolutely dependent.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The ground must suddenly and forever disappear from under their feet, so that they can find balance only in obeying you.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
To uproot conquered peoples has always been, and always will be, the policy of conquerors.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Many great men have felt a moment of pity [...] on the verge of accomplishing a great deed. It has never made them hesitate.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
They take themselves seriously. And from this moment on, they no longer exist, they are shadows.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The greatest thing a man can do [...] is, since he cannot create such wonders, to preserve those that exist.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Never has a city been spared by the pity of an enemy.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
What the sword has killed, no sun sees again.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
Having all seen their loved ones defiled or killed, each one will hasten to submit to what he hates.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The decisive moment is approaching; all these people are like ants to me. They are shadows. They believe they exist, but they are mistaken.
1968
Source: Poems followed by Venice Saved/Venice Saved
The beings I love are creatures. They are born of chance. My meeting them is also a matter of chance.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To know this with all one's soul and not to love them any less.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To imitate God who infinitely loves finite things as finite things.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
We would like everything that has value to be eternal. Yet everything that has value is the product of an encounter [...].
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The meditation on the chance that brought my father and mother together is even more beneficial than meditation on death.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Complete permanence and extreme fragility alike give the feeling of eternity.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
[...] it is intolerable to imagine that the most precious things in the world are left to chance.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
It is because this is intolerable that it must be contemplated. Creation is that very thing.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The only good that is not subject to chance is that which is outside the world.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To know that the most precious thing is not rooted in existence. This is beautiful. Why? It projects the soul outside of time.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The woman who wishes for a child [...] gets him, but she dies and the child is handed over to a stepmother.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Boredom is the moral leprosy that eats away at the countryside in our time. (The cities as well, for that matter.)
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
They say that work is a prayer. That is easy to say. But in fact, it is only true under certain rarely met conditions.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The cosmic element is so absent from Christianity as it is commonly practiced that one could forget that the universe was created by God.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
It is a matter of transforming [...] daily life itself into a metaphor with divine meaning, into a parable.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Manual labor is either a degrading servitude for the soul, or a sacrifice.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Work, if it is performed as a sacrifice, is worth any sacrifice.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Sunlight has always been regarded as the best possible image of God's grace [...].
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Thus all food is an image of communion, an image of the sacrifice par excellence, namely the Incarnation of Christ.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
The thought of God must first be in a human life like leaven in the dough [...] — an infinitely small thing in appearance.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
For many [...], misfortune is a more difficult obstacle to overcome than crime.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Besides the Eucharist, there is another circumstance where bread becomes the flesh of Christ. It is when it is given to the unfortunate in a movement of pure compassion.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Christianity will only permeate society if each social category has its own specific, unique, inimitable connection with Christ.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Students and 'intellectuals' [...] are linked to Him by the words 'I am the Truth.' (This is no small responsibility.)
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Those who have power [...] have the right to punish only on the condition that Christ truly dwells in their soul [...].
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
Social life would appear as an edifice of distinct vocations converging in Christ.
1962
Source: Thoughts Out of Order Concerning the Love of God
[...] socialism which is the 'economic sovereignty of the workers and not that of the bureaucratic and military machine of the State'.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
One does not see [...] how a mode of production based on the subordination of those who execute to those who coordinate could fail to produce a social structure defined by the dictatorship of a bureaucratic caste.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Given that a defeat would risk annihilating, for an indefinite period, everything that gives human life its value in our eyes, it is clear that we must fight by any means that seem to us [...] effective.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Attention, deprived of objects worthy of it, is on the contrary forced to concentrate second by second on a petty, ever-repeating problem [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
When I think that the great Bolshevik leaders claimed to be creating a free working class and that none of them [...] had probably ever set foot in a factory [...], politics appears to me as a sinister joke.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The most difficult temptation to resist, in such a life, is that of giving up thinking altogether: one feels so clearly that it is the only way to no longer suffer!
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The worst thing a human being can do to you in the world is to inflict sufferings that break your vitality and consequently your capacity for work.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
A factory should be [...] a place where one collides harshly, painfully, but still joyfully with real life. Not that dreary place where one only obeys, breaking under constraint everything that is human [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
All the external reasons [...] on which my sense of dignity, my self-respect, were based, were [...] radically shattered by a brutal and daily constraint.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
It did not result in feelings of revolt in me. No, but on the contrary, the thing I least expected of myself in the world—docility. The docility of a resigned beast of burden.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
There are two factors in this slavery: speed and orders. Speed [...] forbids giving way not only to reflection, but even to daydreaming. When you stand before your machine, you must kill your soul for 8 hours a day.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
A smile, a kind word, a moment of human contact are more valuable than the most devoted friendships among the privileged [...]. Only there does one know what human brotherhood is.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
For the reality of life is not sensation, it is activity—I mean activity in both thought and action.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Who then, in the labor movement or so-called, had the courage to think and say, during the period of high wages, that the working class was being debased and corrupted?
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Not only that man should know what he is doing—but if possible that he should perceive its use—that he should perceive nature as modified by him. That for each person, their own work might be an object of contemplation.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The tragedy of this situation is that the work is too mechanical to provide material for thought, and yet it forbids any other thought.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
To think is to go slower; but there are speed standards, set by ruthless bureaucrats, which must be met [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
In the factory, one lives in a state of perpetual and humiliating subordination, always at the command of the bosses.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
I have the feeling [...] of having escaped from a world of abstractions and finding myself among real people—good or bad, but with a genuine goodness or wickedness.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Kindness [...] is something real when it exists; for the slightest act of benevolence [...] requires one to triumph over fatigue, the obsession with wages, and everything that overwhelms and encourages one to withdraw into oneself.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
There, the tendency would rather be to pay for not thinking; so, when you glimpse a flash of intelligence, you are sure it is not deceptive.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
For the reality of life is not sensation, it is activity—I mean activity both in thought and in action.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Those who live for sensations are, materially and morally, only parasites compared to the working and creative people, who alone are human.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
[The search for sensation] leads one to consider loved ones as mere opportunities to enjoy or suffer [...]. One lives among ghosts. One dreams instead of living.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The essence of love, in short, consists in this: that one human being finds they have a vital need for another being [...]. From then on, the problem is to reconcile such a need with freedom [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
My conclusion [...] is not that one must flee from love, but that one must not seek it, especially when one is very young.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
As long as one is incapable of sustained work, one is good for nothing in any field.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Suffering is not important [...]. What matters is not to fail in one's life. And for that, one must discipline oneself.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
I realized [...] how paralyzing and humiliating it is to lack strength, dexterity, and a sure eye.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Without such [physical] exercise, one feels singularly incomplete.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Propaganda does not aim to inspire; it closes [...] all the openings through which inspiration could pass; it inflates the whole soul with fanaticism.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
To want to lead human beings [...] towards the good by merely indicating the direction, without ensuring the presence of corresponding motives, is like trying [...] to make a car with an empty tank go forward.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It happens that a thought [...] works silently in the soul yet acts on it only weakly. If one hears this thought formulated outside oneself, by another [...], it receives a hundredfold strength.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A government that uses words and thoughts too lofty for it, far from receiving any brilliance from them, discredits them and makes itself ridiculous.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
All real inspiration passes into the muscles and emerges as action.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Faith is more realistic than realpolitik. Whoever is not certain of this does not have faith.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A truth never appears except in the mind of a particular human being. [...] A man who has something new to say [...] can at first only be listened to by those who love him.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Misfortune has immense prestige when that of force is joined to it. The misfortune of the weak is not even an object of attention; if indeed it is not an object of repulsion.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
History is nothing more than a compilation of the depositions made by the assassins concerning their victims and themselves.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The only punishment capable of punishing [the oppressor] [...] is a transformation of the meaning of greatness so total that he is excluded from it. [...] To contribute to this transformation, one must have accomplished it in oneself.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Can one admire without loving? And if admiration is a love, how does one dare to love anything other than the good?
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The dogma of progress dishonors the good by making it a matter of fashion.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
History is a fabric of baseness and cruelty in which a few drops of purity shine from afar.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Power is not an end. By nature, by essence, by definition, it constitutes exclusively a means.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Only the desire for perfection has the virtue of destroying in the soul a part of the evil that sullies it. Hence the commandment of Christ: 'Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.'
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
I have no desire to leave. I will leave with anguish.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[...] it seems to me that the decision to stay would be on my part an act of my own will.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
My greatest desire is to lose not only all will, but my own self.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It seems to me that something is telling me to leave. As I am quite sure that it is not sensibility, I abandon myself to it.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
I hope that this abandonment, even if I am mistaken, will ultimately lead me to a safe harbor.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
What I call a safe harbor, [...], is the cross.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
If it cannot be given to me one day to deserve to share in that of Christ, at least that of the good thief.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
Of all the beings other than Christ mentioned in the Gospel, the good thief is by far the one I envy the most.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
To have been at Christ's side [...] during the crucifixion seems to me a much more enviable privilege than to be at his right hand in his glory.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It is enough for my friendship for you that you exist.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
I will not be able to help thinking with sharp anguish of all those I will have left behind [...]. But that too is of no importance.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
It is impossible to think of you without thinking of God.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
[...] in this departure, [it is a matter] of something entirely different [...] than fleeing from suffering and danger.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
My anguish comes precisely from the fear of doing, in leaving, despite myself and unknowingly, what I would above all not want to do—namely, to flee.
1942
Source: Waiting For God
I am [...] sure that there is a God, in the sense that I am [...] sure that my love is not illusory.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I am [...] sure that there is no God, in the sense that [...] nothing real resembles what I can conceive when I pronounce that name.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
There are two atheisms, one of which is a purification of the notion of God.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Between two people who have no experience of God, the one who denies him is perhaps the closest.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The false God who resembles the true one in every way, except that one cannot touch him, forever prevents access to the true one.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
To believe in a God who resembles the true one in every way, except that he does not exist, because one is not at the point where God exists.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The errors of our time are Christianity without the supernatural.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Religion as a source of consolation is an obstacle to true faith: in this sense atheism is a purification.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I must be an atheist with the part of myself that is not made for God.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves is not awakened, the atheists are right and the believers are wrong.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
[One who has been tortured for a long time], if he believed in God's mercy, either he no longer believes in it, or he conceives of it quite differently than before.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I must strive to have a conception of divine mercy that is not erased, that does not change, whatever event destiny may send upon me.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I must strive to have a conception [of faith] that can be communicated to any human being.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The contradictions that the mind comes up against are the only realities, the criterion of the real. [...] Contradiction is the test of necessity.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Contradiction experienced to the very depths of one's being is a tearing apart, it is the cross.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
All true good involves contradictory conditions, and is therefore impossible. He who keeps his attention truly fixed on this impossibility and acts will do good.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
If I want to see both the lake and the forest, I must climb higher. Only, the mountain does not exist. It is made of air. One cannot climb: one must be pulled.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
I have no principle of ascent within me. [...] It is only by directing my thought toward something better than myself that this something pulls me upward. If I am truly pulled, this something is real.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
No imaginary perfection can pull me upward, not even by a millimeter. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the level of myself who imagines it...
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Grace alone can give courage while leaving tenderness intact, or tenderness while leaving courage intact.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The great sorrow of man [...] is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
What we look at down here is not real, it is a stage set. What we eat is destroyed, is no longer real.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
When one advocates the opposite of an evil, one remains at the level of that evil.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The good union of opposites takes place on the plane above.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
The union of contradictories is a tearing apart: it is impossible without extreme suffering.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Method of investigation: as soon as one has thought something, seek in what sense the contrary is true.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
Evil is the shadow of good. All real good [...] projects evil. Only imaginary good does not.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
If one desires only good, one is in opposition to the law that links real good to evil [...], it is inevitable that one falls into misfortune.
1947
Source: Gravity and Grace
How many young minds thus happen to stifle, out of self-doubt, their most well-founded doubts?
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
There is a contradiction [...] between the method of analysis and the conclusions. This is not surprising: the conclusions were developed before the method.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[Man] was determined to make his method an instrument for predicting a future that conformed to his wishes.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[One must avoid] giving in [...] to an unconscious conformity with the most unfounded superstitions of one's time, the cult of production, [...] the blind faith in progress.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Men are not powerless playthings of fate; they are eminently active beings; but their activity is at every moment limited by the structure of the society they form among themselves.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The source of oppression [...] is not found in men, not in institutions, but in the very mechanism of social relations.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The 'State machine' is oppressive by its very nature, its cogs cannot function without crushing the citizens; no amount of goodwill can make it an instrument of the public good.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The State machine develops day by day in a more monstrous way, becomes day by day more foreign to the population as a whole, more blind, more inhuman.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
One does not revise what does not exist [...]. There has never been a Marxism, but several incompatible assertions, some well-founded, others not.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
To be revolutionary, is it to call for with one's wishes and to help with one's actions all that can [...] lighten or lift the weight that crushes the mass of men, [...] to refuse the lies [...]?
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The revolutionary spirit [...] is as old as oppression itself and will last as long as it does, even longer, for if it disappears, it must survive to prevent it from reappearing.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
The assertion that only a society where the act of labor would bring into play all of man's faculties [...] would realize the fullness of human greatness.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Nothing allows us to affirm to the workers that science is with them. [...] Science is practically nothing without the resources of technology, and it does not provide them, it only allows one to use them.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Nothing allows us [...] to affirm to the workers that they have a mission [...]. Like the slaves, [...] they are unhappy, unjustly unhappy; it is good that they defend themselves, it would be beautiful if they freed themselves.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
[Illusions] make them believe that things will be easy, that they are pushed from behind by a modern god called Progress, that a modern providence, called History, is doing the bulk of the effort for them.
1934
Source: Oppression and Liberty
Those who suffer cannot complain, in that life. They would be misunderstood by others, perhaps mocked by those who do not suffer, considered tedious by those who, suffering, have more than enough with their own suffering.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
A beautiful girl, strong, fresh and healthy, said one day [...], after a 10-hour day: We're fed up with the day. Can't wait for Bastille Day so we can dance. [...] it's been 5 years since I've danced. You want to dance, and so you dance in front of the laundry.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The disadvantage of a slave's situation is that one is tempted to consider as really existing human beings who are but pale shadows in the cave.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Painful to walk like this when you don't eat...
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Hunger becomes a permanent feeling. Is it more or less painful than working and eating? An unresolved question... Yes, more painful on the whole.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
It seems that, by convention, fatigue does not exist... Like danger in wartime, no doubt.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
How can I, the slave, get on this bus, use it for my 12 sous just like anyone else? What an extraordinary favor!
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
Slavery has made me completely lose the feeling of having rights. It seems a favor to have moments where I have nothing to endure in the way of human brutality.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
My comrades do not, I believe, have this state of mind to the same degree: they have not fully understood that they are slaves. The words just and unjust have doubtless retained [...] a meaning for them.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The class of those who do not count—in any situation—in anyone's eyes... and who will never count, no matter what happens [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
One always needs for oneself external signs of one's own worth.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The key fact is not suffering, but humiliation.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
An obviously inexorable and invincible oppression does not engender revolt as an immediate reaction, but submission.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
The feeling of personal dignity as fabricated by society is broken. One must forge another for oneself [...].
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
What was gained from this experience? The feeling that I possess no rights whatsoever, to anything [...]. The ability to be morally self-sufficient, to live in this state of perpetual latent humiliation without feeling humiliated in my own eyes.
1934-1942
Source: The Worker's Condition
A courage that is not fueled by the will to kill, that at the point of greatest peril endures the prolonged sight of wounds and agonies, is certainly of a rarer quality [...].
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The aggressor country always starts with a considerable moral advantage, provided the aggression has been prepared and premeditated.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
This cold resolution is rarely united in the same human being with the tenderness required to comfort suffering and agony. But although it is rare, it is not impossible to find.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
I adhere totally to the mysteries of the Christian faith [...]; this adherence is love, not affirmation.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The misfortune spread over the surface of the earth obsesses and overwhelms me to the point of nullifying my faculties, and I cannot [...] free myself from this obsession unless I myself have a large share of danger and suffering.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The fact that one can use words like superiority or inferiority in relation to thought shows how rotten an atmosphere we breathe.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
A meal is not to be compared, it is to be eaten. Likewise, words [...] are eaten to the extent that they are edible, that is, insofar as they contain truth.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
We are born and grow up in falsehood. Truth comes to us only from the outside and always comes from God.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
There is a terrible phrase for me in Isaiah: 'Those who love God are never tired.'
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
It is hard to depend on others. But that is the very nature of the thing. If misfortune were defined by pain and death, it would have been easy for me [...] to fall into the hands of the enemy. But it is defined first and foremost by necessity.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
It seems to me that in reality holiness is, if I may say so, the minimum for a Christian.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
I experience a tearing that worsens ceaselessly, both in my intelligence and in the center of my heart, from my inability to think together in truth the misfortune of men, the perfection of God, and the link between the two.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
A Christian knows that a single thought of love, raised to God in truth, though mute and without echo, is more useful even for this world than the most brilliant action.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
I am convinced that the most fervent Christians [...] do not concentrate their attention much more when they pray or read the Gospel. Why suppose it is any better elsewhere?
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
I have [...] a kind of growing inner certainty that there is within me a deposit of pure gold to be transmitted. Only experience [...] persuades me more and more that there is no one to receive it.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The fact that they [parties] exist is by no means a reason to preserve them. Only what is good is a legitimate reason for preservation.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Democracy, the power of the majority, are not goods in themselves. They are means to the good, considered effective rightly or wrongly.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Only that which is just is legitimate. Crime and lies are not, under any circumstances.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Men converge on what is just and true, whereas lies and crime make them diverge indefinitely.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Collective passion is an impulse to crime and falsehood infinitely more powerful than any individual passion.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
A political party is a machine for manufacturing collective passion.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Every party is totalitarian in germ and in aspiration. If it is not so in fact, it is only because those around it are no less so than itself.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Good alone is an end. Everything belonging to the realm of facts is of the order of means. But collective thought is incapable of rising above the realm of facts.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The goal of a political party is something vague and unreal. [...] The party's existence is palpable [...]. It is thus inevitable that, in fact, the party becomes its own end.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Parties are organizations publicly, officially constituted in such a way as to kill the sense of truth and justice in souls.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The avowed goal of propaganda is to persuade, not to communicate light.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
If one recognizes that there is a truth, one is permitted to think only what is true.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
It is by desiring truth in a vacuum, without trying to guess its content in advance, that we receive the light. That is the whole mechanism of attention.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
There is nothing more comfortable than not thinking.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
The act of taking sides [...] has replaced the obligation to think. This is a leprosy that originated in political circles.
1957
Source: London Writings and Last Letters
Any pain is acceptable in clarity.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
I consider a certain suspension of judgment with regard to all thoughts whatsoever, without exception, as constituting the virtue of humility in the domain of the intellect.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
The essential truth concerning God is that He is good. To believe that God can order men to commit atrocious acts of injustice and cruelty is the greatest error one can make regarding Him.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
Chronology cannot play a determining role in a relationship between God and man, a relationship of which one term is eternal.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
[...] a religion can only be known from within.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
The Catholic religion explicitly contains truths that other religions contain implicitly. But conversely, other religions explicitly contain truths that are only implicit in Christianity.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
Europe was spiritually uprooted, cut off from that antiquity where all the elements of our civilization have their origin; and it went on to uproot the other continents [...].
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
All those who possess in a pure state the love of their neighbor and the acceptance of the world's order, [...] even if they live and die as apparent atheists, are surely saved.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
Christ does not save all those who say to Him, 'Lord, Lord.' But He saves all those who with a pure heart give a piece of bread to a hungry person, without thinking of Him in the least.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
It is as if, over time, one had come to regard not Jesus, but the Church as God incarnate here below.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
Christianity introduced into the world this notion of progress, previously unknown; and this notion, having become the poison of the modern world, has de-Christianized it.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
One must rid oneself of the superstition of chronology to find Eternity.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
If the Gospel omitted all mention of Christ's resurrection, faith would be easier for me. The Cross alone is enough for me.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
The adherence of the intellect is never owed to anything. [...] Attention alone is voluntary. Thus, it alone is a matter of obligation.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
The idea of a quest for man by God is of unfathomable splendor and depth. There is decadence when it is replaced by the idea of a quest for God by man.
1942
Source: Letter to a religious
The need for truth is more sacred than any other. Yet it is never mentioned.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
One becomes afraid to read after realizing the enormity of the falsehoods [...] shamelessly displayed, even in the books of the most reputable authors.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There are men who [...] read in the evening to educate themselves. [...] They take the book at its word. We have no right to feed them falsehoods.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Society feeds [authors] so that they have the leisure and take the trouble to avoid error.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
A switchman who causes a derailment would be poorly received if he claimed he was acting in good faith.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
It is shameful to tolerate the existence of newspapers where [...] no contributor could remain if they did not sometimes agree to knowingly alter the truth.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The public distrusts newspapers, but its distrust does not protect it.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Knowing that a newspaper contains truths and lies, [the public] distributes the news [...] randomly, according to its preferences. It is thus delivered to error.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
When journalism becomes entangled with the organization of lies, it constitutes a crime. But it is believed to be an unpunishable crime.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Where can this strange conception of unpunishable crimes come from? It is one of the most monstrous deformations of the legal mind.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
Any avoidable error should be punished with public reprobation.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There is no need for greater frequency [of information] if the goal is to make people think and not to stupefy them.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
The most sacred need of the human soul [is] the need for protection against suggestion and error.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots
There is no possibility of satisfying a people's need for truth if one cannot find for this purpose men who love the truth.
1943
Source: The Need for Roots