There can be a true grandeur in any degree of submissiveness, because it springs from loyalty to the laws and to an oath, and not from baseness of soul.
Interpretation
True grandeur can be found in selflessness and loyalty, not in weakness.
Simone Weil's quote emphasizes that genuine nobility arises from a deep sense of loyalty to principles and commitments rather than from a place of inferiority or submission due to fear or lack of strength. It suggests that true dignity and greatness stem from upholding one's ideals and responsibilities voluntarily, rather than being forced or manipulated into submission out of a sense of worthlessness.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about integrity and loyalty to principles during a leadership seminar.
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?
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion, through the alluvium which covers the globe, through poetry and philosophy and religion, through church and state, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, till we come to a hard bottom that rocks in place which we can call reality and say, "This is and no mistake.
The world is not given by our fathers but borrowed from our children.
It is too bad that the public expects from me, always, perfection which it is impossible for me always to attain. I am not a machine. I am a human being.
To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.
Karma means your have to live with the consequences of the actions you have taken in the past. Whatever you put out is coming back.
Most young people were getting jobs in big companies, becoming company men. I wanted to be individual.
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