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Simone Weil

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist. Weil was born in Paris to Alsatian agnostic Jewish parents who fled the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Her brilliance, ascetic lifestyle, introversion, and eccentricity limited her ability to mix with others, but not to teach and participate in political movements of her time. She wrote extensively with both insight and breadth about political movements of which she was a part and later about spiritual mysticism. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was "a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range".

Books

Quotes

Ingrid Garcíahas quoted2 years ago
The French philosopher Albert Camus, for example, known for his depiction of a moral landscape without God, praised this lover of God extravagantly, calling her “the only great spirit of our time.”1
Ingrid Garcíahas quoted2 years ago
In Gravity and Grace, Weil uses the language of idolatry to describe the way that religion can become destructive. There, we read that “idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention, and we have not the patience to allow it to develop.”3 So convinced was Weil of human beings’ susceptibility to idolatry that she came to emphasize the necessity of non-action, or waiting for grace, as the starting point for responsible action in the world.4
Ingrid Garcíahas quoted2 years ago
Even today, when people travel the globe and change jobs frequently, maturity still means some measure of “settling down.” In the brief time that she had on this earth, Simone Weil constructed a life that was antithetical to time-honored standards of worldly success. She sought to uproot herself from everything–her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement–to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammeled heart–the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth. We can chart her life according to the turning points in this passionate quest. The body of work she left us–virtually all of it published posthumously–is the fruit of an anguished, but ultimately luminous spiritual journey.
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