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Truly a book everyone should read. A book about God, the type of freedom he offers people regardless of religious institution, lack thereof, or name assigned to them, as well as the constraints people tend to put on divinity, exposed through the lens of a wise child. I think it's one of my favorite books. It's also very short.
It is free to download and borrow on Internet Archive.
5d ago
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This is the best book ever, as decided by myself and various friends !!
Beautiful beautiful story & way with words - i am trying to read this as slowly as possible to make it last
Apr 15, 2024
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I've been reading Simone Weil and I'm glad I found this book when I did. I really needed it. I've been feeling weighed down by the state of the world and family tragedies and dramas. But this book has helped to put some things back into perspective.
Here are some choice excerpts:
- "The tendency to spread evil beyond oneself: I still have it! Beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything even though I be utterly transformed into mud. To sully nothing, even in thought. Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else then? Why, for example, a moment in the life of a human being who could have been happy for that moment?"
- "A king can pay out only imaginary rewards most of the time, or he would be insolvent. It is the same with religion at a certain level. Instead of receiving the smile of Louis XIV, we invent a god who smiles on us."
- "The future is a filler of void places. Sometimes the past also plays this part ('I used to be,' 'I once did this or that...'). But there are other cases when affliction makes the thought of happiness intolerable; then in robs the sufferer of his past.... The past and the future hinder the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field for imaginary elevation. That is why the renunciation of the past and future is the first of all renunciations."
-"A person who is passionately fond of music may quite well be a perverted person–but I should find it hard to believe this of anyone who thirsted for Gregorian chanting."
- "It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves. It is to seek pleasures in friendships, and pleasures which are not deserved. It is something which corrupts even more than love. You would sell your soul for friendship. // Learn to thrust friendship aside, or rather the dream of friendship. To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it."
-"Suffering is nothing, apart from the relationship between the past and the future, but what is more real for man than this relationship? It is reality itself. // The future. We go on thinking it will come until the moment when we think it will never come."
-"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer."
-"To love our neighbor as ourselves does not mean that we should love all people equally, for I do not have an equal love for all modes of existence of myself. Nor does it mean that we should never make them suffer, for I do not refuse to make myself suffer. But we should have with each person the relationship of one conception of the universe to another conception of the universe, and not to a part of the universe."
-"Power (and money, power's master key) is a means at its purest. For that very reason it is the supreme end for all those who have not understood."
Apr 19, 2025
I am only at page 750 of this huge book so bear with me.
This book gets a lot of criticism mainly because a lot of its fans tend to be annoying about it, but if you're willing to read something longer you should check this out.
The writing isn't too difficult, but there's just so many intimate stories in here and it seems like the most relevant/prophetic book to our times (not as 21st century but as in actually now). It's amazing and already one of the best things I've ever read
Apr 17, 2025
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