Explore
Compare
Life
She left a teaching post to work in a factory, fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War, and restricted her own wartime food intake to match occupied France's rations — treating attention and self-denial as the substance of a genuine spiritual life.
He argued that the universe offers no meaning and never will, and that the only serious philosophical question left is whether that is a reason to keep living — his answer, against the odds, was yes.
Connection
Simone Weil posthumous publication and admiration Albert Camus — Camus, working as an editor at Gallimard after the war, personally championed the publication of Weil's surviving notebooks and essays, calling her simply the only great spirit of their time.
Ideas
Words
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
“Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them, but it is also their means of communication.”
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Key Moments
1934–1935
Works in a Renault factory
1943
Dies after restricting her own rations
1943
Edits the Resistance newspaper Combat
1957
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
Works
Gravity and Grace
The Myth of Sisyphus