Elie Wiesel quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elie Wiesel on Wise Famous Quotes.

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.

One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.

The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night.

What would the future of man be if it were devoid of memory?

Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

She is gazing out into the night, and the night has a thousand eyes, which are mine.

I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.

From Jeff Greenfield: "I once asked Elie Wiesel "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "An optimist," he said. "I have to be.

I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone - terribly alone in a world without God and without (hu)man(ity).

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.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

One person of integrity can make a difference.

Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.

Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.

The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.

We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Beggars inspired me with mingled feelings of love and fear. I knew that I ought to be kind to them, for they might not be what they seemed.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

How was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?

THE BELOVED OBJECTS that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions. Every

First we must understand that there can be no life without risk - and when our center is strong, everything else is secondary, even the risks.

In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.

The silence of two people is deeper than the silence of one.

The primary task of a Jew in turbulent times is to be Jewish.

For me democracy is the only way of life. The opposite is dictatorship or anarchy.

Every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer ...

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.

I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.

Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, The hater has power. All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.

Only the guilty are guilty. Their children are not.

If the victims are my problem, the killers are yours.

His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I

It always hurts when you lose a secret.

It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?

I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.

And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.

Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.

You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

The sins I regret the most are the one's I didn't commit.

Only fanatics - in religion as well as in politics - can find a meaning in someone else's death.

Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

Every murder is a suicide.

It is by his freedom that a man knows himself, by his sovereignty over his own life that a man measures himself.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

Some stories are true that never happened.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

As a child I was afraid of death. I was not afraid to die, but every time I thought of death I shuddered.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

Ou do not leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, you are taking it with you.

And yet, this tale about despair becomes a story against despair.

You shouldn't act as a spokesperson for someone who's trying to impose his will on you.

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent?

You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves.

We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them

When has religion ever been unifying? Religion has introduced many wars in this world, enough bloodshed and violence.

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.

Peace is our gift to each other.

If the only prayer you say throughout your life is "Thank You," then that will be enough.

The more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects.

I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?

If I love you more, will you suffer less?

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

Did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.

Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.

I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it ...

Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.

The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference

My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.

There were two sorts of light in the room: one white, around the sleeping Gideon and Joab, the other black, enveloping the ghosts.

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.

The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.

Holy War is a contradiction of terms ...

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

After trampling over many bodies and corpses, we succeeded in getting inside. We let ourselves fall to the ground.

If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.

Today's wealthy are poor though they don't know it. They can't bring their possessions to where we're all going.

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.

Humanity would never tolerate it

Memory is the keyword which combines past with present, past and future.

Every moment contains a spark of eternity.

Anything you want to say about God you better make sure you can say in front of a pit of burning babies.