Eva Fogelman, Robert Coles and several other scholars believe that this experience may have contributed to the exceptionally strong altruism which Weil displayed throughout her life.

[24] From her childhood home, Weil acquired an obsession with cleanliness; in her later life she would sometimes speak of her "disgustingness" and think that others would see her this way, even though in her youth she had been considered highly attractive.

[27] According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities for love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged.

From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her "fragile beauty" by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes.

[24] Officials at the school were outraged by her indifference to clothing, her refusal to participate in their traditions, and her ignoring a rule banning women from smoking with male students, for which she was suspended.

Weil stated that, "one thing alone mattered in the world today: the revolution that would feed all people on earth," with a young Beauvoir replying that the point of life was to find meaning, not happiness.

[24] When the school director called Weil in for questioning, students and coworkers rallied behind her and ultimately the city council raised the pay of the workers.

According to Pétrement, she was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists.

The work however uses a Marxist method of analysis: paying attention to oppression, critiquing Weil's own position as an intellectual, and advances both manual labor and theory and practice.

She identified as an anarchist[45] and sought out the anti-fascist commander Julián Gorkin, asking to be sent on a mission as a covert agent to rescue the prisoner Joaquín Maurín.

Weil was attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, when she had the first of three pivotal religious experiences: being moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns in a procession she stumbled across while on holiday to Portugal (in Póvoa de Varzim).

She was led to pray for the first time in her life as Lawrence S. Cunningham relates: Below the town is the beautiful church and convent of San Damiano where Saint Clare once lived.

[61]Weil had a third, more powerful, revelation a year later while reciting George Herbert's poem Love III, after which "Christ himself came down and took possession of me",[62] and, from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues.

In 1938 Weil visited the Benedictine Solesmes Abbey and while suffering from headaches she found pure joy in Gregorian chant that she felt the "possibility of living divine love in the midst of affliction".

[83] Weil's first English biographer, Richard Rees, offers several possible explanations for her death, citing her compassion for the suffering of her countrymen in occupied France and her love for and close imitation of Christ.

It constitutes, then, another way in which the divine reality behind the world invades people's lives: where affliction conquers with brute force, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.

"[108] Simone Petrement, a friend of Weil's, wrote that the essay portrayed the Iliad as an accurate and compassionate depiction of how both victors and victims are harmed by the use of force.

She painstakingly analyzes the spiritual and ethical milieu that led to France's defeat by the German army, and then addresses these issues with the prospect of eventual French victory.

For Weil roots involved obligations to participate in community life, feel connected to place, and maintain links through time.

[113][42] In contrast, a threat to the human soul is uprootedness (déracinement) is the condition of people where the only binding forces in society are money and the imagined nation.

[114] Weil states that "money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate" and it "manages to outweigh all other motives because the effort it demands of the mind is so much less...".

[120] Weil is also cited as an influence by Iris Murdoch,[121] Jacques Derrida,[122] Albert Camus,[123] Franz Fanon,[124] Emmanuel Levinas,[125] George Grant,[126] Adrienne Rich,[127] Jacqueline Rose,[128] and Thomas Merton.

"[28] Foolish though she may have appeared at times—dropping a suitcase full of French resistance papers all over the sidewalk and scrambling to gather them up—her deep engagement with both the theory and practice of caritas, in all its myriad forms, functions as the unifying force of her life and thought.

"[133] The Routledge edition of Gravity and Grace includes a New York Times Book Review stating "‘In France she is ranked with Pascal by some, condemned as a dangerous heretic by others, and recognized as a genius by all.

[135] Weil has been criticised, however, even by those who otherwise admired her deeply, such as T. S. Eliot, for being excessively prone to divide the world into good and evil, and for her sometimes intemperate judgments.

[28] General Charles de Gaulle, her ultimate boss while she worked for the French Resistance, considered her "insane",[140] although even he was influenced by her and repeated some of her sayings for years after her death.

Haslett noted that Weil had become "a little-known figure, practically forgotten in her native France, and rarely taught in universities or secondary schools".

[144] Weil was also the subject of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's La Passion de Simone (2008), written with librettist Amin Maalouf.

Weil's work, Venice Saved, was not completed in her lifetime but put together as a play and translated by Silvia Panizza and Philip Wilson.

[146] T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Octavia Bright, Anne Carson, Adrienne Rich, Annie Dillard, Mary Gordon, Maggie Helwig, Stephanie Strickland, Kate Daniels, Sarah Klassen and Lorri Neilsen Glennall cite Weil as an inspiration of their books and literature.