I met Simone Weil

I wanted to meet her.
She was in a bar, talking to some workers, rolling and smoking cigarettes all the time.
I have stolen pieces of thoughts, vision, passion, strong words without possibility to escape, which were saying:

Write as much as possible: to learn to write well means learning to think well. The writing can be more honest than talking, because it doesn’t have to keep in count of the public, of the other.

The thought has to be considered as work. Such as writing, painting, composing music: work. As to build, to shape. You learn, and you get to the results, as you learn to become a smith, only doing.
And to be able to do you have to be free.
To be truly free is to act according to the will, and not to indulge to the desire and passion that enslave.
The will does not manifest in intention, neither in the decision, but only in action.

To have with the Greats and with their works a ratio of daily habit: read them, read them again, learn them. The great works of Art speak the language of the absolute, of beauty, which awakens the thought and guides man to the truth of himself.
Everyone must move towards this beauty to build the autonomy of his own mind. Man must rise above himself. We must have in ourselves the idea that we must change, transform ourselves.

It’s not enough to want to have. You can not have it directly.
But we must act to make it happen, and to do this you need first to have in front of your eyes your life all and to decide to do something with it,  pointing it in a certain way of the will and of the work.
Is the total involvement, the entire action, which involves body and soul, which leaves no room.

You have to decide for yourself, at any cost, you don’t have the right to place yourself under the authority of another.

You need a teacher, who is a real teacher, only if he teaches you to seek the truth through your own life.

The knowledge. It 's a work of the thought. It has to be able to save from  impetuous action (emotion), from  smoky imagination, from blind opinion, and from violence.

The attention as essential nourishment for thought. Thought as maximum push to  attention.

Living the thought as attention to a task made of moments connected to a precise goal, leads to the awareness of the liberating function of thought.
The concrete definition of freedom is when the thought of the action comes before the action.
Understanding of our own work and the perception of its usefulness procure to the man the feeling of creating.

The Art is knowledge. Or rather, Art is exploration.
The triumph of Art is to lead to something else: to life.

Time is the image of necessity and for this has to be accepted in all its moments with awareness.
Do not postpone things. Do not submit blindly to them, do not escape with the unconscious.

We must begin by being faithful to small tasks.

Life can and should be more real and full. Don’t mutilate it in advance with any renunciation. Do not let imprison yourself by any affection. Preserve your solitude. If ever will come a day in which  a "real" friendship is given to you, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship. And it’s from this infallible sign that you will recognize.

Friendship doesn’t have to be found, nor dreamed or desired.
Friendship has to be trained. It’s a virtue.

Pain and beauty can lead us out of the cave towards the true light, but this exit is nothing more than the acquisition of the ability to read multiple meanings of the symbols of the real. Beauty and pain overlap and merge one into the other.

The only possible liberation takes place through obedience to necessity.
The attention to all stages of an "experience" that costs you suffering, and the courage to face them, create in you the "fortitude". Used in this way, suffering, becomes a focus of education and training.

Boredom is a sickness of the soul. Therefore, in all aspects of social life, in every moment of life, you need a certain amount of risk, which would commit the resources of the soul and the courage. In this way you win and eradicates boredom in the soul.

"I have always believed that the moment of death is the norm and purpose of life ... even when I was a kid, and I thought atheistically and materialistically, I had always a fear: of missing, not my life, but my death."
And to achieve this result, it takes a lifetime of training.

The workers were listening. In silence. With the respect that you have for the one who seems to want to reveal to us a big secret. The secret of life. While she was speaking. Speaking and smoking.
Who said that smoking is bad?