Category Archives: Simone Weil

To Joë Bousquet
(Marseille, 12 May 1942)

Joë Bousquet was permanently paralysed as the result of a wound in the First World War. Simone Weil had sent him her Plan for an Organization of Front-Line Nurses, and he had replied with a letter of commendation, of which she hoped to make use.

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Cher ami,

First of all, thank you for what you have just done for me. If your letter is effective, as I hope, you will have done it not for me but for others through me – for your younger brothers who should be infinitely dear to you, since the same fate has struck them. Perhaps some of them will owe to you, just before the moment of death, the solace of an exchange of sympathy.

You are specially privileged in that the present state of the world is a reality for you. Perhaps even more so than for those who at this moment are killing and dying, wounding and being wounded, because they are taken unawares, without knowing where they are or what is happening to them; and, like you in your time, they are unable to think thoughts appropriate to their situation.

As for the others – the people here, for example – what is happening is a confused nightmare for some of them (though very few), and for the majority it is a vague background, like a theatrical drop-scene. In either case, it is unreal.

But you, on the other hand, for twenty years you have been repeating in thought that destiny which seized and then released so many men, but which seized you permanently – and which now returns again to seize millions of men. You, I repeat, are now really equipped to think it. Or if you are still not quite ready – as I think you are not – you have at least only a thin shell to break before emerging from the darkness inside the egg into the light of truth.

It is a very ancient image. The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love – the Love which is God himself, and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.

The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is – unconfused by perspective. Compared to what it is inside the egg, space has become an infinity to the second or rather the third power.

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence – not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation. It is the secret word, the word of Love, who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

You, once you have emerged from the shell, will know the reality of war – which is the most precious reality to know, because war is unreality itself. To know the reality of war is the Pythagorean harmony, the unity of opposites; it is the plenitude of knowledge of the real.

That is why you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body, waiting for years in patient fidelity until you are ripe to know it. Those who fell beside you did not have time to collect their thought from its frivolous wandering and focus it upon their destiny. And those who came back unwounded have all killed their past by oblivion – even if they have seemed to remember it – because war is affliction, and it is as easy to direct one’s thought voluntarily towards affliction as it would be to persuade an untrained dog to walk into a fire and let itself be burnt.

To think affliction, it is necessary to bear it in one’s flesh, driven very far in like a nail, and for a long time, so that thought may have time to grow strong enough to regard it – to regard it from outside, having succeeded in leaving the body and even, in a sense, the soul as well.

Body and soul remain not only pierced through but nailed down at a fixed point. Whether or not affliction imposes literal immobility, there is always enforced immobility – in the sense that a part of the soul is always steeped, monotonously, incessantly, and inextricably, in pain.

Thanks to this immobility, the infinitesimal seed of divine love placed in the soul can slowly grow and bear fruit in patience – the divinely beautiful Gospel expression. Translators say in patientia, but hypomonē is quite another thing. It means to remain where one is, motionless, in expectation, unshaken and unmoved by any external shock.

Fortunate are those in whom the affliction which enters their flesh is the same one that afflicts the world itself in their time. They have the opportunity and the function of knowing the truth of the world’s affliction and contemplating its reality. And that is the redemptive function itself. Twenty centuries ago, in the Roman Empire, slavery was the affliction of the age, and crucifixion was its extreme expression.

But alas for those who have this function and do not fulfil it. When you say that you do not feel the difference between good and evil, your words are not serious if taken literally, because you are speaking of another man in you who is clearly the evil in you. You are well aware – or, when there is any doubt, a careful scrutiny can nearly always dispel it – which of your thoughts, words, and deeds strengthen that other man in you at your expense, and which ones strengthen you at his.

What you mean is that you have not yet consented to recognize this difference as the distinction between good and evil.

It is not an easy consent to give, because it commits one irrevocably. There is a kind of virginity in the soul as regards good, which is lost forever once the soul has given this consent – just as a woman’s virginity is lost after she has yielded to a man. The woman may become unfaithful, adulterous, but she will never again be a virgin. So she is frightened when she is about to yield. Love triumphs over this fear.

For every human being there is a point in time, a limit, unknown to anyone and above all to himself, but absolutely fixed, beyond which the soul cannot keep this virginity. If, before this precise moment (fixed from all eternity), it has not consented to be possessed by the good, it will immediately afterwards be possessed in spite of itself by the bad.

A man may yield to the bad at any moment of his life, because he yields to it unconsciously and unaware that he is admitting an external authority into his soul; and before surrendering her virginity to it, the soul drugs herself with an opiate. To be possessed by the bad, it is not necessary to have consented to it; but the good never possesses the soul until she has said yes.

And such is the fear of consummating the union that no soul has the power to say yes to the good unless she is urgently constrained by the almost immediate approach of the time-limit which will decide her eternal fate. For one man, this time-limit may occur at the age of five, for another at the age of sixty. In any case, neither before nor after it has been reached is it possible to locate it temporally; in the sphere of duration, this instantaneous and eternal choice can only be seen refracted.

For those who have yielded to the bad a long time before the limiting moment is reached, this moment is no longer real. The most a human being can do is to guard intact his faculty for saying yes to the good, until the time when the limiting moment has almost been reached.

It appears to me certain that for you this limiting moment has not yet arrived. I lack the power to read men’s hearts, but it seems to me that there are signs that it is not far distant. Your faculty for consent is certainly intact.

I think that when you have consented to the good you will break the shell – after an interval perhaps, but doubtless a short one – and the moment you are outside it, there will be pardon for that bullet which once pierced the centre of your body, and thus also for the whole universe which drove it there.

The intelligence has a part in preparing the nuptial consent to God. It consists in looking at the evil in oneself and hating it. Not trying to get rid of it, but simply descrying it and keeping one’s eyes fixed upon it until one feels repulsion – even before one has said yes to its opposite.

I believe that the root of evil – in everybody perhaps, but certainly in those whom affliction has touched, and above all if the affliction is biological – is day-dreaming. It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted; the one solace to help them bear the fearful burden of time; and a very innocent one, besides being indispensable. So how could it be possible to renounce it?

It has only one disadvantage, which is that it is unreal. To renounce it for the love of truth is really to abandon all one’s possessions in a mad excess of love and to follow him who is the personification of Truth. And it is really to bear the cross; because time is the cross.

While the limiting moment is still remote, it is not necessary to do this; but it is necessary to recognize day-dreaming for what it is. And even while one is sustained by it, one must never forget for a moment that in all its forms – those that seem most inoffensive by their childishness, those that seem most respectable by their seriousness and their connection with art or love or friendship – in all its forms without exception, it is falsehood. It excludes love. Love is real.

I would never dare to speak to you like this if all these thoughts were the product of my own mind. But although I am unwilling to place any reliance on such impressions, I do really have the feeling, in spite of myself, that God is addressing all this to you, for love of you, through me. In the same way, it does not matter if the consecrated host is made of the poorest quality flour — not even if it is three parts rotten.

You say that I pay for my moral qualities by distrust of myself. But my attitude towards myself, which is not distrust but a mixture of contempt and hatred and repulsion, is to be explained on a lower level — on the level of biological mechanisms.

For twelve years I have suffered from pain around the central point of the nervous system, the meeting-place of soul and body; this pain persists during sleep and has never stopped for a second. For a period of ten years it was so great, and was accompanied by such exhaustion, that the effort of attention and intellectual work was usually almost as despairing as that of a condemned man the day before his execution — and often much more so, for my efforts seemed completely sterile and without even any temporary result.

I was sustained by the faith, which I acquired at the age of fourteen, that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result, either direct or indirect. Nevertheless, a time came when I thought my soul menaced, through exhaustion and an aggravation of the pain, by such a hideous and total breakdown that I spent several weeks in anguished uncertainty whether death was not my imperative duty — although it seemed to me appalling that my life should end in horror. As I told you, I was only able to calm myself by deciding to live conditionally, for a trial period.

A little earlier, when I had already been for years in this physical state, I worked for nearly a year in engineering factories in the Paris region. The combination of personal experience and sympathy for the wretched mass of people around me — in which I formed, even in my own eyes, an undistinguishable item — implanted so deep in my heart the affliction of social degradation that I have felt a slave ever since, in the Roman sense of the word.

During all this time, the word God had no place at all in my thoughts. It never had, until the day — about three and a half years ago — when I could no longer keep it out. At a moment of intense physical pain, while I was making the effort to love (although believing I had no right to give any name to the love), I felt — while completely unprepared for it (I had never read the mystics) — a presence more personal, more certain, and more real than that of a human being; it was inaccessible both to sense and to imagination, and it resembled the love that irradiates the tenderest smile of somebody one loves.

Since that moment, the name of God and the name of Christ have been more and more irresistibly mingled with my thoughts.

Until then, my only faith had been the Stoic amor fati as Marcus Aurelius understood it — to love the universe as one’s city, one’s native country, the beloved fatherland of every soul; to cherish it for its beauty, in the total integrity of the order and necessity which are its substance, and all the events that occur in it.

The result was that the irreducible quantity of hatred and repulsion which goes with suffering and affliction recoiled entirely upon myself. And the quantity is very great, because the suffering in question is located at the very root of my every single thought, without exception.

This is so much the case that I absolutely cannot imagine the possibility that any human being could feel friendship for me. If I believe in yours, it is only because I have confidence in you and you have assured me of it, so that my reason tells me to believe it. But this does not make it seem any the less impossible to my imagination.

Because of this propensity of my imagination, I am all the more tenderly grateful to those who accomplish this impossibility. Because friendship is an incomparable, immeasurable boon to me, and a source of life — not metaphorically, but literally.

Since it is not only my body but my soul itself that is poisoned all through by suffering, it is impossible for my thought to dwell there, and it is obliged to travel elsewhere. It can only dwell for brief moments in God; it dwells often among things; but it would be against nature for human thought never to dwell in anything human.

Thus it is literally true that friendship gives to my thought all the life it has, apart from what comes to it from God or from the beauty of the world.

So you can see what you have done for me by giving me yours.

I say these things to you because you can understand them. Your last book contains a sentence, in which I recognize myself, about the mistake your friends make in thinking that you exist. That shows a type of sensibility which is only intelligible to those who experience existence directly and continuously as an evil.

For them it is certainly very easy to do as Christ asks and deny themselves. Perhaps it is too easy. Perhaps it is without merit. And yet I believe that to have it made so easy is an immense privilege.

I am convinced that affliction on the one hand, and on the other hand joy, when it is a complete and pure commitment to perfect beauty, are the only two keys which give entry to the realm of purity, where one can breathe: the home of the real.

But each of them must be unmixed: the joy without a shadow of incompleteness; the affliction completely unconsoled.

You understand me, of course. That divine love which one touches in the depth of affliction, like Christ’s resurrection through crucifixion — that love, which is the central core and intangible essence of joy — is not a consolation. It leaves pain completely intact.

I am going to say something which is painful to think, more painful to say, and almost unbearably painful to say to those one loves:

For anyone in affliction, evil can perhaps be defined as being everything that gives any consolation.

A pure joy, which in some cases may replace pain or in others may be superimposed on it, is not a consolation. On the other hand, there is often a consolation in morbidly aggravating one’s pain. I don’t know if I am expressing this properly; it is all quite clear to me.

The refuge of laziness and inertia — a temptation to which I succumb very often, almost every day, or I might say every hour — is a particularly despicable form of consolation. It compels me to despise myself.

I perceive that I have not answered your letter, and yet I have a lot to say about it. I must do it another time. Today I’ll confine myself to thanking you for it.

Yours most truly,

S. Weil

I enclose the English poem, “Love,” which I recited to you. It has played a big role in my life, because I was repeating it to myself at the moment when Christ came to take possession of me for the first time. I thought I was only reciting a beautiful poem, but, unknown to me, it was a prayer.

We must rediscover the idea of the metaphor which is real.

— First and Last Notebooks

Gravity and Grace (tr. Crawford):

– Any attempt to gain this deliverance by means of my own energy would be like the efforts of a cow which pulls at its hobble and so falls onto its knees.

– The source of man’s moral energy is outside him, like that of his physical energy (food, air etc.). He generally finds it, and that is why he has the illusion—as on the physical plane—that his being carries the principle of its preservation within itself. Privation alone makes him feel his need. And, in the event of privation, he cannot help turning to anything whatever which is edible. There is only one remedy for that: a chlorophyll conferring the faculty of feeding on light. Not to judge. All faults are the same. There is only one fault: incapacity to feed upon light, for where capacity to do this has been lost all faults are possible. ‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me.’

– Man only escapes from the laws of this world in lightning flashes.

– Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls.

– Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it. A gas which contracted leaves a vacuum—this would be contrary to the law of entropy.

– A rock in our path. To hurl ourselves upon this rock as though after a certain intensity of desire had been reached it could not exist any more. Or else to retreat as though we ourselves did not exist. Desire contains something of the absolute and if it fails (once its energy has been used up) the absolute is transferred to the obstacle.

– The necessity for a reward, the need to receive the equivalent of what we give. But if, doing violence to this necessity, we leave a vacuum, as it were a suction of air is produced and a supernatural reward results. It does not come if we receive other wages: it is this vacuum which makes it come.

– To come out of the cave, to be detached, means to cease to make the future our goal.

– Let the whole universe be for me, in relation to my body, what the stick of a blind man is in relation to his hand. His sensibility is really no longer in his hand but at the end of the stick.

– In affliction the vital instinct survives all the attachments which have been torn away, and blindly fastens itself to everything that can provide it with support, like a plant fastens its tendrils.

– Affliction, from this point of view, is hideous as life in its nakedness always is, like an amputated stump, like the swarming of insects.

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

– The bridges of the Greeks. We have inherited them but we do not know how to use them. We thought they were intended to have houses built upon them. We have erected skyscrapers on them to which we ceaselessly add storeys. We no longer know that they are bridges, things made so that we may pass along them, and that by passing along them we go towards God.

– Power (and money, power’s master key) is means at its purest. For that very reason, it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood.

This world, the realm of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing except means. Our will is for ever set from one means to another like a billiard ball.

– The existence of opposite virtues in the souls of the saints: the metaphor of climbing corresponds to this. If I am walking on the side of a mountain I can see first a lake, then, after a few steps, a forest. I have to choose either the lake or the forest. If I want to see both lake and forest at once, I have to climb higher. Only the mountain does not exist. It is made of air. One cannot go up: it is necessary to be drawn. An experimental ontological proof. I have not the principle of rising in me. I cannot climb to heaven through the air. It is only by directing my thoughts towards something better than myself that I am drawn upwards by this something. If I am really raised up, this something is real. No imaginary perfection can draw me upwards even by the fraction of an inch. For an imaginary perfection is automatically at the same level as I who imagine it — neither higher nor lower.

– Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the handle or the point. For him who loves, its metallic coldness will not destroy love, but will give the impression of being abandoned by God. Supernatural love has no contact with force, but at the same time it does not protect the soul against the coldness of force, the coldness of steel. Only an earthly attachment, if it has in it enough energy, can afford protection from the coldness of steel. Armour, like the sword, is made of metal. Murder freezes the soul of the man who loves only with a pure love, whether he be the author or the victim, so likewise does everything which, without going so far as actual death, constitutes violence. If we want to have a love which will protect the soul from wounds, we must love something other than God. Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.

– The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken on the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is no more at least than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

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

– God wears himself out through the infinite thickness of time and space in order to reach the soul and to captivate it. If it allows a pure and utter consent (though brief as a lightning flash) to be torn from it, then God conquers that soul. And when it has become entirely his he abandons it. He leaves it completely alone and it has in its turn, but gropingly, to cross the infinite thickness of time and space in search of him whom it loves. It is thus that the soul, starting from the opposite end, makes the same journey that God made towards it. And that is the cross.

– The cross as a balance, as a lever. A going down, the condition of a rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. In the same way ‘he who humbleth himself shall be exalted’.

– The simultaneous existence of opposite virtues in the soul—like pincers to catch hold of God.

– Evil is the shadow of good. All real good, possessing solidity and thickness, projects evil. Only imaginary good does not project it.

– Necessity is God’s veil.

– The use of reason makes things transparent to the mind. We do not, however, see what is transparent. We see that which is opaque through the transparent – the opaque which was hidden when the transparent was not transparent. We see either the dust on the window or the view beyond the window, but never the window itself. Cleaning off the dust only serves to make the view visible. Reason should be employed only to bring us to the true mysteries, the true undemonstrables, which are reality. The uncomprehended hides the incomprehensible and should on this account be eliminated.

– Others. To see each human being (an image of oneself) as a prison in which a prisoner dwells, surrounded by the whole universe.

– The constant illusion of Revolution consists in believing that the victims of force, being innocent of the outrages that are committed, will use force justly if it is put into their hands. But except for souls which are fairly near to saintliness, the victims are defiled by force just as their tormentors are. The evil which is in the handle of the sword is transmitted to its point. So the victims thus put in power and intoxicated by the change do as much harm or more, and soon sink back again to where they were before.

– Monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity — the most atrocious if it is the sign of an unvarying perpetuity. It is time surpassed or time sterilized. The circle is the symbol of monotony which is beautiful, the swinging of a pendulum of monotony which is atrocious.

– The spirituality of work. Work makes us experience in the most exhausting manner the phenomenon of finality rebounding like a ball; to work in order to eat, to eat in order to work. If we regard one of the two as an end, or the one and the other taken separately, we are lost. Only the cycle contains the truth. A squirrel turning in its cage and the rotation of the celestial sphere — extreme misery and extreme grandeur.

when man sees himself as a squirrel turning round and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.

Waiting for God (tr. Craufurd [translator’s name spelled differently in this publication])

– The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the centre of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.

(‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’)

– When we hit a nail with a hammer, the whole of the shock received by the large head of the nail passes into the point without any of it being lost, although it is only a point. If the hammer and the head of the nail were infinitely big it would be just the same. The point of the nail would transmit this infinite shock at the point to which it was applied. Extreme affliction, which means physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time, is a nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout space and time. Affliction is a marvel of divine technique. It is a simple and ingenious device which introduces into the soul of a finite creature the immensity of force, blind, brutal, and cold. The infinite distance separating God from the creature is entirely concentrated into one point to pierce the soul in its center. The man to whom such a thing happens has no part in the operation. He struggles like a butterfly pinned alive into an album. 

(‘The Love of God and Affliction’)

First and Last Notebooks (tr. Rees)

Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. We are experiencing this. The root which, mixed with faith, has produced this fruit, ought to be torn up.

Man is like a castaway, clinging to a spar and tossed by the waves. He has no control over the movement imposed on him by the water. From the highest heaven God throws a rope. The man either grasps it or not. If he does, he is still subject to the pressures imposed by the sea, but these pressures are combined with the new mechanical factor of the rope, so that the mechanical relations between the man and the sea have changed. His hands bleed from the pressure of the rope, and he is sometimes so buffeted by the sea that he lets go, and then catches it again.

But if he voluntarily pushes it away, God withdraws it.

Seventy Letters (tr. Rees)

— To Joë Bousquet, 1943

The egg is this world we see. The bird in it is Love – the Love which is God himself, and which lives in the depths of every man, though at first as an invisible seed. When the shell is broken and the being is released, it still has this same world before it. But it is no longer inside. Space is opened and torn apart.

The spirit, leaving the miserable body in some corner, is transported to a point outside space, which is not a point of view, which has no perspective, but from which this world is seen as it is – unconfused by perspective. Compared to what it is inside the egg, space has become an infinity to the second or rather the third power.

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence – not an absence of sound, but a positive object of sensation. It is the secret word, the word of Love, who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

You, once you have emerged from the shell, will know the reality of war – which is the most precious reality to know, because war is unreality itself. To know the reality of war is the Pythagorean harmony, the unity of opposites; it is the plenitude of knowledge of the real.

That is why you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body, waiting for years in patient fidelity until you are ripe to know it. Those who fell beside you did not have time to collect their thought from its frivolous wandering and focus it upon their destiny. And those who came back unwounded have all killed their past by oblivion – even if they have seemed to remember it – because war is affliction, and it is as easy to direct one’s thought voluntarily towards affliction as it would be to persuade an untrained dog to walk into a fire and let itself be burnt.

To think affliction, it is necessary to bear it in one’s flesh, driven very far in like a nail, and for a long time, so that thought may have time to grow strong enough to regard it – to regard it from outside, having succeeded in leaving the body and even, in a sense, the soul as well.

Body and soul remain not only pierced through but nailed down at a fixed point. Whether or not affliction imposes literal immobility, there is always enforced immobility – in the sense that a part of the soul is always steeped, monotonously, incessantly, and inextricably, in pain.

Thanks to this immobility, the infinitesimal seed of divine love placed in the soul can slowly grow and bear fruit in patience – the divinely beautiful Gospel expression. Translators say in patientia, but hypomonē is quite another thing. It means to remain where one is, motionless, in expectation, unshaken and unmoved by any external shock.

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

Whoever endures a moment of the void either receives the supernatural bread or falls. It is a terrible risk, but one that must be run — even during the instant when hope fails. But we must not throw ourselves into it.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (tr. Crawford)

We pretend that our present system is democratic, yet the people never have the chance or the means to express their views on any problem of public life. Any issue that does not pertain to particular interests is abandoned to collective passions, which are systematically and officially inflamed.

― Simone Weil, ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties’ (tr. Leys)

I do not need any hope or any promise to believe that God is rich in mercy. I know this wealth of his with the certainty of experience; I have touched it. What I know of it through actual contact is so far beyond my capacity of understanding and gratitude that even the promise of future bliss could add nothing to it for me; since for human intelligence the addition of two infinites is not an addition.

— Weil, letter, 1942 (tr. Craufurd)

When a person, event or work meets with success or notoriety, it is generally found that the height reached by these modern substitutes for glory is in exact proportion to the vanity and impurity of their source. A scandal makes a greater sensation than an act of heroism, a boxer or film star attracts more attention than a great artist or a solitary philosopher, and, when fame does chance to descend upon true greatness, it is more than likely that there has been some misapprehension or mistake; either the greatness is not seen for what it is but triumphs under some disguise, or the ‘glory’ merely lights up that side of it which is showy, picturesque and, for that reason, superficial. Nietzsche said: ‘When a great truth triumphs in the market place, you may be sure that a great lie has contributed to its victory.’ That is the bitter and almost inevitable price of success. Who has written a book on ‘the refusal to succeed’?

— Perrin & Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her (tr. Crauford)