Simone Weil Quotes

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

It is very difficult to give a 15 second sound bite on why there is pain and suffering in this world and not have it come off as being flippant or surface level or superficial.

My suggestion is that there's no way out of the human condition. Sex, death, marriage, children, parents, illness. There's no way out. They're a misery, all of them.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

Suffering is part of the divine idea.

The doctrine of original sin claims that all men sinned in Adam; but whether they did or whether it is merely a fact that all men sin does not basically affect the problem of suffering.

Sin carries in it its own misery.

It's a fallen world. We eat and sacrifice in the process.

We may not commit a lesser Sin under pretence to avoid a greater, but we may, nay we ought to endure the greatest Pain and Grief rather than commit the least Sin.

Sorrow is held the eldest child of sin.

I spent some time in Hell.

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.

The greatest evil is physical pain.

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

Sharp and fell remorse, the offspring of my sin! Why do you, O God, lacerate my heart so late? Why, O boding cries, that scream so close to me,--why do I listen to you now, and never heard you before?

The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.

All the cruelty and torment of which the world is full is in fact merely the necessary result of the totality of the forms under which the will to live is objectified.

Death is not the worst evil, but rather when we wish to die and cannot.

God hath yoked to guilt her pale tormentor,--misery.

Sins are timeless. Sins are an everyday reality for every one. Sin has been in existence since the beginning of man, since Adam and Eve. It will always be pertinent.

Misery is the River of the World

We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so.

You would not easily guess All the modes of distress Which torture the tenants of earth; And the various evils, Which like so many devils, Attend the poor souls from their birth.

There is no Mystery so great as Misery.