The beautiful is a carnal attraction which keeps us at a distance and implies a renunciation. This includes the renunciation of that which is most deep-seated, the imagination. We want to eat all the other objects of desire. The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined.
The abandonment at the supreme moment of the crucifixion, what an abyss of love on both sides!
Martin Buber, I and Thou
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
[F]orce is that which turns both its wielders and its victims into things. That is to say, under the guise of subject-object relations, violence actually works to construct object-object relations between otherwise sentient beings.
It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
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 sensitivity of the innocent victim who suffers is like felt crime. True crime cannot be felt. The innocent victim who suffers knows the truth about his executioner, the executioner does not know it. The evil which the innocent victim feels in himself is in his executioner, but he is not sensible of the fact. The innocent victim can only know the evil in the shape of suffering. That which is not felt by the criminal is his own crime. That which is not felt by the innocent victim is his own innocence. It is the innocent victim who can feel hell.
We console ourselves with fantasies of bouncing back but we must hold on to what has really happened and not cover it with imagining how we are to unhappen it. Void makes loss a reality.
I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.
[The void is] the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt.
I can easily imagine that [God] loves that perspective of creation that
can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a screen.
I must withdraw so that he might see it.
I must withdraw so that God might enter into contact with the
beings whom chance places in my path and so that he might love me.
My presence is indiscreet, as though I found myself between two lov-
ers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed but
the unwelcome third who is with the two lovers and who ought to go
away so that they can really be together.
If I only knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect union of
love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear …
That I might disappear so that those things that I see may become
perfectly beautiful from the fact that they are no longer things that I
see.
I do not in the least wish that this created world should no longer
be perceptible, but that it should no longer be me to whom it is per-
ceptible. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. That I might
leave, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.
To see a landscape as it is when I am not there …
Little Bristling Soul 