How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Interpretation
Self-doubt can prevent individuals from pursuing their true thoughts and beliefs.
This quote by Simone Weil highlights the detrimental effects of lacking self-confidence. It suggests that many individuals, due to their insecurities, suppress their legitimate doubts and questions, ultimately missing opportunities for introspection and growth. This reflection underlines the importance of believing in oneself to engage fully with our thoughts and aspirations.
In practice
In a motivational speech addressing young professionals about the importance of trust in their ideas.
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.
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.
We say, sorrow, disaster, calamity. God says, chastening and it sounds sweet to him though it is a discord to our ears. Don't faint when you are rebuked, and don't despise the chastening of the Lord. In your patience possess your souls.
Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
Passion goes, Boredom remains.
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