We are like horses who hurt themselves as soon as they pull on their bits - and we bow our heads. We even lose consciousness of the situation, we just submit. Any re-awakening of thought is then painful.
Interpretation
The quote reflects how submission can lead to suffering and a loss of awareness.
Simone Weil uses the metaphor of horses wearing bits to illustrate how individuals often submit to their circumstances, leading to self-inflicted pain and a disconnect from reality. This submission makes it difficult to regain consciousness of one's true situation, and the awakening to one’s own condition can be a painful realization.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a philosophy class to spark discussions about self-awareness and submission.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
I've always been fascinated with the stealing of innocence. It's the most heinous crime, and certainly a capital crime if there ever was one.
Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.
Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
I am not tired of my work, neither am I tired of the world; yet, when Christ calls me home, I shall go with gladness.
He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.
Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.
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