Simone Weil

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first English edition, this Routledge Classics edition offers the English reader the complete text of this landmark work for the first time ever.

Gravity and Grace

kite

The sin which we have in us emerges from us and spreads outside ourselves setting up a contagion of sin... But at the contact of a perfectly pure being there is a transmutation and the sin becomes suffering.

It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.

eris

She is so special and important to me. Insightful and clarifying - a lot of this book beautifully paralleled NA work about will, faith, self, prayer, attention. Despite losing me at times (often) in her religious logic, this is one of my favorite philosophical texts. I love the one moment where she steps outside her philosophical purity to confess her lost lover: ‘I think I love wrongly.’ Felt like she was whispering a secret to me. If anyone would like to sit down and answer all my questions about this (like what is she saying about socialism?? Marxism??) I’m available

gabrielle v

She is so special and important to me. Insightful and clarifying - a lot of this book beautifully paralleled NA work about will, faith, self, prayer, attention. Despite losing me at times (often) in her religious logic, this is one of my favorite philosophical texts. I love the one moment where she steps outside her philosophical purity to confess her lost lover: ‘I think I love wrongly.’ Felt like she was whispering a secret to me. If anyone would like to sit down and answer all my questions about this (like what is she saying about socialism?? Marxism??) I’m available

'Love is not consolation. It is light.'

Banger

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, political activist, and religious mystic, was little known when she died young in 1943. Four years later the philosopher-farmer Gustave Thibon compiled La pesanteur et la grâce from the notebooks she left in his keeping. In 1952 this English translation accelerated the fame and influence of Simone Weil. The striking aphorisms in Gravity and Grace reflect the religious philosophy of Weil’s last years. Written at the onset of World War II, when her health was deteriorating and her left-wing social activism was giving way to spiritual introspection, this masterwork makes clear why critics have called Simone Weil “a great soul who might have become a saint” and “the Outsider as saint, in an age of alienation.”

Prashant Prasad

“i also am other than what i imagine myself to be. to know this is forgiveness.”

Partie de la philosophie pour entrer en religion, née dans une famille d'origine juive pour se rapprocher du christianisme, Simone Weil a suivi un parcours étonnant, qui la mènera d'un statut de jeune fille de la bourgeoisie aux confins de la plus atroce misère matérielle. Animée d'une soif absolue qui la fait vivre -comme d'autres vivent de pain- , elle rend compte, dans ses écrits, de cette aventure exceptionnelle. 'La pesanteur et la grâce', recueil de ses pensées, de ses réflexions les plus intimes, témoigne de cette exigence et de ce destin. Conçu comme une succession de réflexions sur des thèmes variés, mais dont la cohérence est frappante, ce livre constitue une remarquable initiation à son oeuvre.

Gravity and Grace

Reviews

Highlights