# Quote — Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

> To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place while he is speaking. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction, or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself. It is more difficult than suicide would be for a happy child. Therefore 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.
>
> That is why there is no hope for the vagrant as he stands before the magistrate. Even if, through his stammerings, he should utter a cry to pierce the soul, neither the magistrate nor the public will hear it. His cry is mute. And the afflicted are nearly always equally deaf to one another; and each of them, constrained by the general indifference, strives by means of self-delusion or forgetfulness to become deaf to his own self.

- Author: [Simone Weil](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil.md)
- Book: [Simone Weil: An Anthology](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology.md)
- Page: 71
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Simone_Weil#Human_Personality_(1943)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/to-listen-to-someone

## More from this book

> But if Germany, thanks to Hitler and his successors, were to enslave the European nations and destroy most of the treasures of their past, future historians would certainly pronounce that she had civilized Europe.

p. 124 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/but-if-germany.md)

> A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

p. 125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/a-pharisee-is-someone.md)

> The common run of moralists complain that man is moved by his private self-interest: would to heaven it were so! Private interest is a self-centered principle of action, but at the same time restricted, reasonable and incapable of giving rise to unlimited evils. Whereas, on the other hand, the law of all activities governing social life, except in the case of primitive communities, is that here one sacrifices human life — in himself and in others — to things which are only means to a better way of living. This sacrifice takes on various forms, but it all comes back to the question of power. Power, by definition, is only a means; or to put it better, to possess a power is simply to possess means of action which exceed the very limited force that a single individual has at his disposal. But power-seeking, owing to its essential incapacity to seize hold of its object, rules out all consideration of an end, and finally comes, through an inevitable reversal, to take the place of all ends. It is this reversal of the relationship between means and end, it is this fundamental folly that accounts for all that is senseless and bloody right through history. Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men — oppressed and oppressors alike — the plaything of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being the chattel of inanimate chattels.

p. 141 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/simone-weil/simone-weil-an-anthology/the-common-run.md)