Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus in a letter to Weil's mother in 1951 wrote:
Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.
For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.
Thomas Merton records being asked to review a biography of Weil (Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, Jacques Chabaud, 1964) and was challenged and inspired by her writing. “Her non-conformism and mysticism are essential elements in our time and without her contribution we remain not human.”
Simone Weil may well be one of the most extraordinay women of the twentieth century. There is something very special about this woman whose life is a genuine reflection of her philosophy. Right there she is not your usual philosopher.
Appreciating her requires a certain freedom from dualistic thought. Someone having experienced a triune or conscious top down vertical reality will be helped by Simone's intellectual depth and emotional purity.
The secular mind cannot appreciate why Simone Weil, a highly regarded atheist and Marxist admired by Leon Trotsky could become a Christian mystic and an intellectual influence on Pope Paul Vl.
Simone is Simone. If you welcome truth and the quest for objective knowledge at the expense of your opinions, you will appreciate her. If not it is best to avoid her sting. Since I support the efforts for our species to become more human as Thomas Merton suggests, I further the efforts to introduce Simone to the World.
"I believe that one identical thought is to be found--expressed very precisely and with only slight differences of modality-- in. . .Pythagoras, Plato, and the Greek Stoics. . .in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita; in the Chinese Taoist writings and. . .Buddhism. . .in the dogmas of the Christian faith and in the writings of the greatest Christian mystics. . .I believe that this thought is the truth, and that it today requires a modern and Western form of expression. That is to say, it should be expressed through the only approximately good thing we can call our own, namely science. This is all the less difficult because it is itself the origin of science." Simone Weil....Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, Random House, 1976, p. 488