Simone Weil (3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943)

There is something that lives deep in the heart of man, from earliest childhood, from the cradle to the grave, which, despite every sin committed and suffered, and every bad thing experienced and unrepentant, invariably awaits something good to be done and not something bad. And it is this something, that above all is sacred in every single person. (The Personal and the Sacred)

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To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the ploughed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the starving beggar and the beggar who has been fed.

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If we except the highest forms of sanctity and genius, that which gives the impression of being true in man is almost bound to be false, and that which is true is almost bound to give the impression of being false. Work is needed to express what is true: also to receive what is true. We can express and receive what is false, or at least what is superficial, without any work. When truth appears as least as true as falsehood it is a triumph of sanctity or of genius. Thus Saint Francis made his audience cry just like a cheap theatrical preacher would have done.

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Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

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Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently. (Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace)