Simone Weil

"We can only know one thing about God - that he is what we are not. Our wretchedness alone is an image of this. The more we contemplate it, the more we contemplate him."

"To want friendship is a great fault. Friendship ought to be a gratuitous joy, like the joys afforded by art or life."

"Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication."

"Beauty always promises, but never gives anything."

"Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace."

"To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves."