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Simone Weil

3 February 1909-24 August 1943

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The Academic is one who wields culture as an instrument to manufacture academics, who, when their turn comes, will manufacture academics.

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The Apparatus is (as the bureaucracy, the police and the military) mankind's greatest adversary: It tramples all human values.

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Art has no immediate future on account of the fact that all art is collective and collective life is no more.

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Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: To construct and to refrain from destruction.

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Atheism is alone able to serve God in a way that amounts to one of the most exquisite pleasures of human love... namely, to serve the loved one without his knowing it.

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Atheism is often just faith and love concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.

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Atheism is of two kinds. One of these is a purification of the notion of God.

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Atheism is often a more sincere position than than that of the religious man. If two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.

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Attachment is a manufacturer of illusion... whoever wants reality ought to be detached.

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Attention is a bringer of truth, beauty, and goodness when brought fully to bare on an object. Thus, teaching should have no aim but to prepare, by training the attention, for the possibility of such an act.

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Attention is a kind of communion with things. To look at the sky on a clear night with concentrated attention is to allow all of one's thoughts to disappear and the stars to enter into one's soul.

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Attention is that faculty whose development is the real object and almost the sole interest of studies.

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Barbarism begins when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization. This very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.

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A Battle is fought not by the planning man, the man of strategy, or the man acting on the resolution taken. It is fought and decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have dropped either to the level of inert matter and pure passivity, or blind force and pure momentum.

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Beauty is linked to vulnerability because vulnerability is a mark of existence.

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Beauty is one of the only two things (along with suffering) that pierce the human heart.