Words matter. These are the best Elie Wiesel Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
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.
For me, every hour is grace.
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.
When I was young I lost everything.
Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.
I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
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.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
I have to be self-conscious of what I’m trying to do with my life.
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.
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
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.
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.
Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
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.
When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
I don’t know much about politics, and I don’t want to know. That’s why I rarely involve myself in politics.
I love teaching.
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.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
For me, every hour is grace.
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
I believe in superstitions. You don’t talk about a child who hasn’t been born.
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.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
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.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Religion is not man’s relationship to God, it is man’s relationship to man.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
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.
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.
Peace is our gift to each other.
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
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.
In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
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.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
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.
Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.
Some stories are true that never happened.
If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.
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.
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
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.
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.
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
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.
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.
I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.
