Elie Wiesel Quotes

The only wealth I'm interested in is a wealth of words.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

I never teach the same course twice.

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

Our backyard looked like a marketplace. Valuable objects, precious rugs, silver candlesticks, Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty grounds- pitiful relics that seemed never to have had a home. All this under a magnificent blue sky.

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

In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.

For me, every hour is grace.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

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.

No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us.

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.

Today again the teacher is the important thing, but on the other hand anti-Semitism is growing today. No doubt about it. All over the world, especially in Europe, and it's true they begin with anti-Israeli attitudes and then it's so strong that it runs over and becomes anti-Semitic.

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

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.

Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin and it was as if Juliek's soul had become the bow. He was playing his life ... He played that which he would never play again.

Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself

I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.

So many crazed men, so many cries, so much bestial brutality.

Love is this and love is that; man is born to love; he is only alive when he is in the presence of a woman he loves or should love.

Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.

Human beings all change. Not what they are but who they are. We have the power to change what we do with our life and turn it into our destiny.

I've worked with five Presidents in America, all of them I ask the same question always: Why didn't the American allies bomb the railways going to Auschwitz?

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.

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

One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.

man is born to love; he is only alive when he is in the presence of a woman he loves or should love. I

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.

Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war

The American and the British armies liberated camps, there wasn't a single order of the day: Let's go and liberate the camp. They stumbled upon the camps. Same thing with the Russians, I asked the Colonel who liberated Auschwitz, they didn't, there wasn't a priority. But I feel that that was a mistake, it was a sin because they could have saved so many people and they didn't.

All I could hear was the violin, and it was as if Juliek's soul had become his bow. He was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings. His unfulfilled hopes. His charred past, his extinguished future.

It's over. God is no longer with us." And as though he regretted having uttered such words so coldly, so dryly, he added in his broken voice, "I know. No one has the right to say things like that. I know that very well. Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God's mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I'm neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I'm a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God's mercy? Where's God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?

Our first act as free men was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. thats all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread.

I remember those faces of people who were good I saw that. I saw a father who gave his bread to his son and his son gave back the bread to his father. That, to me, was such a defeat of the enemies, will of the enemies, theories of the enemies, aspirations, here [in Auschwitz].

Be careful with words, they're dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words

Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?" And

Peace is our gift to each other.

It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto - it was illusion.

We are all brothers and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive. (pg. 39)

Then he smiled. I shall always remember that smile. What world did it come from? Heavy snow continued to fall over the corpses.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

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.

He was a past master of making himself seem insignificant, of seeming invisible.

God is God because he remembers.

I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.

An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman

I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.

Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.

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

I'm going to teach you the art of distinguishing between day and night. Always look at a window, and failing that look into the eyes of a man. If you see a face, any face, then you can be sure that night has succeeded day. For, believe me, night has a face." Then,

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.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.

To pull a man out of the mud, the Just Man must set foot into that mud. To bring back lost souls, he must leave the comfort of his home and seek them wherever they might be. "In every man, there is something of the Messiah." In every man, in every place. The Kabbala says it, the mystics repeat it. To free mankind one must gather the sparks, all the sparks, and integrate them into the sacred flame. A Messiah who would seek to save only the Just, would not be the Messiah. The others must be considered too - they must be prepared. Miscreants need redemption more than saints. And that is the reason - we are told - why Rebbe Nahman braved so many dangers in so many inhospitable territories - alone.

You mustn't forget laughter either. Do you know what laughter is? It's God's mistake. When God made man in order to bend him to his wishes he carelessly gave him the gift of laughter. Little did he know that later that earthworm would use it as a weapon of vengeance. When he found out, there was nothing he could do; it was too late to take back the gift. And yet he tried his best. He drove man out of paradise, invented an infinite variety of sins and punishments, and made him conscious of his own nothingness, all in order to prevent him from laughing. But, as I say, it was too late. God made a mistake before man made his. What they have in common is that they are both irreparable.

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.

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

I had my religious crisis after the war, not during the war.

I don't believe in collective guilt. The children of killers are not killers, but children.

There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death. In

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

The night lifted, leaving behind it a grayish light the color of stagnant water. Soon there was only a tattered fragment of darkness, hanging in mid-air, the other side of the window. Fear caught my throat. The tattered fragment of darkness had a face. The face was my own.

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

[Moishe] explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer ...
And why do you pray, Moishe?' I asked him.
I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.

Bite your lips, little brother ... Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now ... Wait. Clench your teeth and wait ...

Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.

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

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.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

I don't think I should accept other people's suffering because I suffered. Just the opposite, because I suffered I don't want others to suffer.

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.

The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

Be careful in your relations with those in power; they draw you close or allow you to approach them only when they need you. They are your friends when your friendship is useful to them and affords them pleasure, but they forget you when you are in trouble.
Elie Wiesel quoting Rabban Gamliel

Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. Does that seem paradoxical? Well, war is not afraid of paradoxes.

Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb.

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

the torturer scores a victory over his victim when the latter, in the grip of doubt, begins to torture himself.

You are in a concentration camp. In Auschwitz ... "
A pause. He was observing the effect his words had produced. His face remains in my memory to this day. A tall man, in his thirties, crime written all over his forehead and his gaze. He looked at us as one would a pack of leprous dogs clinging to life.
"Remember," he went on. "Remember it always, let it be graven in your memories. You are in Auschwitz. And Auschwitz is not a convalescent home. It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don't you will go straight to the chimney. Work or crematorium
the choice is yours.

Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.

Love makes everything complicated.

But where shall I start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I know best, my own. But my country is so very large, I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

Are you forgetting that losing a game is an error or a lesson, but losing one's time is a sin?

We marched. Gates opened and closed. We continued to march between the barbed wire. At every step, white signs with black skulls looked down on us. The inscription: WARNING! DANGER OF DEATH. What irony. Was there here a single place where one was NOT in danger of death?

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.

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

It always hurts when you lose a secret.

We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything - death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth. At

There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.

[The shock of finding a familiar word in an unfamiliar setting.] A SS man would examine us. Whenever he found a weak one, a musulman as we called them, he would write his number down: good for the crematory.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, 'why didn't you discover the cure for such and such? why didn't you become the Messiah?' The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is 'why didn't you become you?'

One day when we came to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest... Years later, I witnessed a similar spectacle in Aden. Out ship's passengers amused themselves by throwing coins to the "natives," who dove to retrieve them. An elegant Parisian lady took great pleasure in this game. When I noticed two children desperately fighting in the water, one trying to strangle the other, I implored the lady, 'Please don't throw any more coins!' 'Why not?' said she. 'I like to give charity...

Look, whatever you do in life, remember, think higher and feel deeper. It cannot be bad if you do that.

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out,
swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing ...
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes.
And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still
red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
"For God's sake, where is God?"
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
"Where He is? This is where
hanging here from this gallows ... "
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.