There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that men who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the world, like inert matter.

~ Simone Weil

The poetics of affliction

Simone Weil:

We should make every effort we can to avoid affliction, so that the affliction which we meet may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter.