Elie Wiesel Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Elie Wiesel:
I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn't have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself or anyone, by the very fact that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I do not belong to this world. I continue to write everything in longhand. If I have to see something on the Internet, I ask my secretary or students. I am lucky, because I have people who do it for me.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
After all, God is God because he remembers.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I love teaching.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I never teach the same course twice.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Some stories are true that never happened.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Peace is our gift to each other.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
For me, every hour is grace.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
When I was young I lost everything.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
~Elie Wiesel
Link:
Share:
Permalink:
Browse: