...nothing on earth can stop man from feeling himself born for liberty. Never, whatever may happen, can he accept servitude; for he is a thinking creature.
Interpretation
The desire for freedom is an inherent part of human nature, and true servitude is fundamentally rejected by those who think.
Simone Weil emphasizes the intrinsic human yearning for liberty, suggesting that no external force can extinguish this deep-seated instinct. As thinking beings, people resist subjugation and are driven by an innate sense of purpose and autonomy, making true servitude unacceptable.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, one might use this quote to emphasize the human spirit's need for freedom.
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?
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe and to make his particular, private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging.
Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
The point is not to completely understand God but to worship Him. Let the very fact that you cannot know Him fully lead you to praise Him for His infiniteness and grandeur.
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.
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