The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

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Quote for the Day

15 Sep 2007 08:00 pm

"... those to whom destiny lends might, perish for having relied too much upon it. It is impossible that they should not perish. For they never think of their own strength as a limited quantity, nor of their relations with others as an equilibrium of unequal powers. Other men do not impose upon their acts that moment for pausing from which alone our consideration for our fellows proceeds: they conclude from this that destiny has given all licence to them and none to their inferiors.

Henceforth they go beyond the measure of their strength, inevitably so, because they do not know its limit. Thus they are delivered up helpless before chance, and things no longer obey them. Sometimes chance serves them, at other times it hinders, and here they are, exposed, naked before misfortune without that armour of might which protected their souls, without anything any more to separate them from tears," - Simone Weil, "The Iliad, Poem of Might," in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (Moyer Bell, 1977), pp. 163-164.

(Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty.)

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Excerpt: Andrew Sullivan quotes Simone Weil ... those to whom destiny lends might, perish for having relied too much upon it. It is impossible that they should not perish. For they never think of their own strength as a limited quantity,...
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