Top 100 Elie Wiesel Quotes
#1. 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)
Elie Wiesel
#2. Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.
Elie Wiesel
#3. 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
#4. The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria ...
Elie Wiesel
#5. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.
Elie Wiesel
#6. In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
Elie Wiesel
#7. Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
Elie Wiesel
#8. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself
Elie Wiesel
#9. 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?
Elie Wiesel
#10. Holy War is a contradiction of terms ...
Elie Wiesel
#11. I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen.
Elie Wiesel
#12. Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.
Elie Wiesel
#13. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel
#15. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#16. I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
Elie Wiesel
#17. 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?
Elie Wiesel
#18. The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.
Elie Wiesel
#19. Then he smiled. I shall always remember that smile. What world did it come from? Heavy snow continued to fall over the corpses.
Elie Wiesel
#20. In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
Elie Wiesel
#21. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. And
Elie Wiesel
#22. Jews, listen to me,' she cried. I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames.
Elie Wiesel
#23. Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
Elie Wiesel
#24. You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves.
Elie Wiesel
#25. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer ... Man
Elie Wiesel
#26. If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
Elie Wiesel
#27. The knowledge that I have acquired must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude.
Elie Wiesel
#28. A Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.
Elie Wiesel
#29. No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them
Elie Wiesel
#30. How much longer would our lives be lived from one "last night" to the next?
Elie Wiesel
#31. Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.
Elie Wiesel
#32. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Elie Wiesel
#33. What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls.
Elie Wiesel
#34. When our center is strong, everything else is secondary.
Elie Wiesel
#35. 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
#36. I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.
Elie Wiesel
#37. Yet another last night. The last night at home, the last night in the ghetto, the last night in the train, and, now, the last night in Buna. How much longer were our lives to be dragged out from one 'last night' to another?
Elie Wiesel
#38. I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Elie Wiesel
#39. 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?
Elie Wiesel
#40. 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
#41. Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.
Elie Wiesel
#42. His eyes would suddenly go blank, leaving two gaping wounds, two wells of terror.
Elie Wiesel
#43. Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.
Elie Wiesel
#44. What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.
Elie Wiesel
#45. People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.
Elie Wiesel
#46. For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold. A
Elie Wiesel
#47. We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.
Elie Wiesel
#48. I am much more afraid of my good deeds that please me than of my bad deeds that repel me.
Elie Wiesel
#49. It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction.
Elie Wiesel
#50. 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
Elie Wiesel
#51. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him.
Elie Wiesel
#52. You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.
Elie Wiesel
#53. God means movement, and not explanation.
Elie Wiesel
#54. What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?
Elie Wiesel
#55. the torturer scores a victory over his victim when the latter, in the grip of doubt, begins to torture himself.
Elie Wiesel
#56. As a child I was afraid of death. I was not afraid to die, but every time I thought of death I shuddered.
Elie Wiesel
#57. Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, The hater has power. All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.
Elie Wiesel
#58. Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.
Elie Wiesel
#59. Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.
Elie Wiesel
#60. I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
Elie Wiesel
#61. [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.
Elie Wiesel
#62. True enemies aren't always the ones who hate each other.
Elie Wiesel
#63. 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
#64. What is man?
Hope turned to dust.
No.
What is man?
Dust turned to hope.
Elie Wiesel
#65. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#66. The criminal is not alone when he returns to the scene of the crime; he is joined there by his victim, and both are driven by the same curiosity: to relive that moment which stamped past and future for each.
Elie Wiesel
#67. I think he is condemned by himself to loneliness. God is One: he was, he is, he will be always One. One is so lonely. Maybe that is why he created human beings
to feel less lonely. But as human beings betray his creation, he may become even lonelier.
Elie Wiesel
#68. It is up to us to determine whether the years ahead will be for humankind a curse or a blessing. We always must remember that it is given to men and women to choose life and living, not death and destruction.
Elie Wiesel
#69. Today there isn't a university where they don't have special courses [Jewish studies or Holocaust studies], hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.
Elie Wiesel
#70. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. Akiba
Elie Wiesel
#71. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Elie Wiesel
#72. Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know.
Elie Wiesel
#73. Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
Elie Wiesel
#74. Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.
Elie Wiesel
#75. I'd rather speak as a student of philosophy. Philosophically it makes no sense, absolutely makes no sense. Why should people inherit evil things when their memories could contain and should invoke good things?
Elie Wiesel
#76. Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?
Elie Wiesel
#77. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, and so are you.
Elie Wiesel
#78. The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference
Elie Wiesel
#79. I come from a very religious background.And actually I remained in it. All my anger I describe in my quarrels with God in Auschwitz, but you know I used to pray every day.
Elie Wiesel
#81. 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?'
Elie Wiesel
#82. 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
#83. We still are looking for someone who knows the secret of immortality. Only God is immortal; we are not.
Elie Wiesel
#84. For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship.
Elie Wiesel
#85. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame.
Elie Wiesel
#86. This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.
Elie Wiesel
#87. Only fanatics - in religion as well as in politics - can find a meaning in someone else's death.
Elie Wiesel
#88. 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
#89. Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.
Elie Wiesel
#90. Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.
Elie Wiesel
#91. 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
#92. Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.
Elie Wiesel
#93. So I wrote this novel in order to explore distant memories and buried doubts: What would have become of me if I had spent not just one year in the camps, but two or four? If I had been appointed kapo? Could I have struck a friend? Humiliated an old man? And
Elie Wiesel
#94. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
Elie Wiesel
#95. We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.
Elie Wiesel
#96. My hands were aching, I was clenching them so hard. To strangle the doctor and the others! To set the whole world on fire! My father's murderers! But even the cry stuck in my throat.
Elie Wiesel
#97. Was it she who saved me from the silent death that characterizes resignation to solitude?
Elie Wiesel
#98. Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.
Elie Wiesel
#99. It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.
Elie Wiesel
#100. In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.
Elie Wiesel
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