Elie wiesel quotes

For nearly 3,500 years Exodus has left such an imprint on people's memories that I cannot imagine it had been invented just as a legend or a tale.

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

Every single human being is a unique human being. And, therefore, it's so criminal to do something to that human being, because he or she represents humanity.

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.

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the happiness and humanity of the human being.

An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

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

We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.

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

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Once upon a time refugee meant somebody who has a refuge, found a place, a haven where he could find refuge.

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

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

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.

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

To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice

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

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

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

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?'

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

All those - or most of those - who went through the experience during the Second World War - they want to remember more - more and more. It's never enough because we feel that we have to tell the story. And no one can tell the story fully.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

John XXI was a very great pope and he's the one who actually corrected the liturgy. He did so because of his friend Jules Isaac, a French Jewish historian who was a friend of John Paul, of John 23rd, and he convinced him and he changed the liturgy, no more Jew, the perfidious Jew and so forth and now, and don't speak any more of the Jews killing Christ. Things have changed.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories

The most important question a human being has to face... What is it? The question, Why are we here?

How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.

One person of integrity can make a difference.

I learned to trust the threats of enemies before the promises of friends.

In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest. I love that word.

I was there when God was put on trial....At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.

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

Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.

Emphasis must be put on learning: there is no substitute to education. It can be briefly formulated in a few words: always, whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.

Because I survived, I must do everything possible to help others.

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.

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

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Even in darkness it is possible to create light.

My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.

No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

... True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. True, we are too poor to eliminate hunger; but in feeding one child, we protest against hunger. True, we are too timid and powerless to take on all the guards of all the political prisons in the world; but in offering our solidarity to one prisoner we denounce all the tormentors. True, we are powerless against death; but as long as we help one man, one woman, one child live one hour longer in safety and dignity, we affirm man's [woman's] right to live.

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One's very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.

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

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew 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.

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... one person of integrity can make a difference.

We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)

To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.

Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

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

Every moment is a new beginning.

Only the guilty are guilty: the children of killers are not killers, but children.

You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?

Think higher, feel deeper.

Always remember, my good friends, that there is one sin we must never commit and it is to humiliate another person or to allow another person to be humiliated in our presence without us screaming and shouting and protesting.

A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering... The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

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

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

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

This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.

In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest. I love that word. We are all partners in a quest. The essential questions have no answers. You are my question, and I am yours - and then there is dialogue. The moment we have answers, there is no dialogue. Questions unite people.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

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

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.

In order to fly, you have to give up the ground you are standing on.

I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person weighs more than them all.

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

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.

Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

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

My faith is a wounded faith, but it's not without faith. My life is not without faith.

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.

What is man? Hope turned to dust. No. What is man? Dust turned to hope.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering.

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

You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.

For us it's not easy to be conformist, I cannot stand to be conformist, I don't accept what it is, I like to say no. If I see an injustice I scream.

Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?

There is no word in Hebrew for religion, by the way.

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.

Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.

Take sides. Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.

The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it.

My good friends, we are all waiting. We are waiting, if not for the Messiah, as such, we are waiting for the messianic moment. And the messianic moment is what each and every one of us tries to build, meaning a certain area of humanity that links us to all those who are human and, therefore, desperately trying to fight despair as humanly as possible and - I hope - with some measure of success.

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.

[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.

Peace is our gift to each other.

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

Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

A religious person answers to God, not to the elected or non-elected official.

Eternity is the place where questions and answers become one.

Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember. The main thing is to teach them where not to go. Oppression, not to go; dictatorship, not to go; racism and prejudice, absolutely not to go. This is a moral plan [for society].

Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees.

Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.

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 swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

The danger lies in forgetting.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

Every moment contains a spark of eternity.

I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don't know how

you can do something. You can, even for one person Don't turn away; help. Because those who suffer, often suffer not because of the person or the group that inflicts the suffering; they seem to suffer because nobody cares.