Top 100 Wiesel Quotes
#1. If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?
Scott Pelley
#2. Often we feel the need to say that a book isn't just about a particular time or place but is about the human spirit. People say this of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, or Night by Elie Wiesel, or A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.
Will Schwalbe
#3. We know every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering....
- Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, 1986
Edward Iwata
#4. As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.
Iris Chang
#5. No heart is as whole as a broken heart, and no faith is as solid as a wounded faith. Elie Wiesel
John Ortberg
#6. In the preceding pages, to paraphrase the words of Auschwitz survivor, writer, and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, we share Martin Small's personal journey not so that you will understand but so that you will know you can never understand.
Martin Small
#7. Elie Wiesel says that neutrality only helps the oppressor, never the victim. And I think you can apply that to journalism.
Jorge Ramos
#8. 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
Elie Wiesel
#9. From Jeff Greenfield: "I once asked Elie Wiesel "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "An optimist," he said. "I have to be.
Elie Wiesel
#10. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#11. Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.
Elie Wiesel
#12. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#13. Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
Elie Wiesel
#14. One person of integrity can make a difference.
Elie Wiesel
#15. 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
#16. Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.
Elie Wiesel
#17. Thoughts arise in the hostage's tormented brain. In the hospital, patients feel they are returning to childhood; in prison, they age. The gods blind themselves.
Elie Wiesel
#18. 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
#19. Man's strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?
Elie Wiesel
#20. It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.
Elie Wiesel
#21. 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
#22. After all, God is God because he remembers.
Elie Wiesel
#23. The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria ...
Elie Wiesel
#24. Today's wealthy are poor though they don't know it. They can't bring their possessions to where we're all going.
Elie Wiesel
#25. Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.
Elie Wiesel
#26. How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end?
Elie Wiesel
#27. Men to the left! Women to the right!
Eight words spokern quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother.
Elie Wiesel
#28. The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal ... (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)
Elie Wiesel
#29. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#30. Warmed-over loves and soups are generally not recommended.
Elie Wiesel
#31. Music does not replace words, it gives tone to the words
Elie Wiesel
#32. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#33. Perhaps fate isn't blind after all. Perhaps it's capable of fantasy, even compassion.
Elie Wiesel
#34. 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
Elie Wiesel
#35. What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.
Elie Wiesel
#36. 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
#37. In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
Elie Wiesel
#38. Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?
Elie Wiesel
#39. Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking, 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.
Elie Wiesel
#40. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to life as long as God himself
Elie Wiesel
#41. 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
#42. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#43. My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.
Elie Wiesel
#44. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.
Elie Wiesel
#45. One can do without solutions. Only the questions matter. We may share them or turn away from them.
Elie Wiesel
#46. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#47. I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.
Elie Wiesel
#48. When adults wage war, children perish.
Elie Wiesel
#49. It always hurts when you lose a secret.
Elie Wiesel
#50. God made (human beings) because he loves stories.
Elie Wiesel
#51. I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like
free at last!
Elie Wiesel
#52. Holy War is a contradiction of terms ...
Elie Wiesel
#53. Every nation has its prestigious military academies - or so few of them - that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?
Elie Wiesel
#54. I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.
Elie Wiesel
#55. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#56. In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.
Elie Wiesel
#57. I knew that I was no longer arguing with him but with Death itself, with Death that he had already chosen.
Elie Wiesel
#58. At every step, somebody fell down and ceased to suffer.
Elie Wiesel
#59. I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it ...
Elie Wiesel
#60. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
Elie Wiesel
#61. I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.
Elie Wiesel
#62. I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
Elie Wiesel
#63. Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.
Elie Wiesel
#64. 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.
Elie Wiesel
#65. I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do.
Elie Wiesel
#66. Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.
Elie Wiesel
#67. I tried to put on a smile but, being too cold, I could only manage a grin. That's one reason why I don't like winter: smiles become abstract.
Elie Wiesel
#68. A holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it.
Elie Wiesel
#69. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel
#71. There is a coalition of anti-Semitism today, the extreme left, the extreme right and in the middle the huge corpus of Islam. I'm worried, I go around with a very heavy heart.
Elie Wiesel
#74. The revolver was black and nearly new. I was afraid to even touch it, for in it lay all the whole difference between what I was and what I was going to be.
Elie Wiesel
#75. Stripped of their property, crushed and mutilated, they still embody the nobility of Israel and the eternity of God, while their enemy - who is your enemy as well - embodies all that is most vile in man. I shall act not as their detractor, but as their melitz yosher, their intercessor.
Elie Wiesel
#76. If I love you more, will you suffer less?
Elie Wiesel
#77. It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie Wiesel
#78. In the early Sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex, David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development.
Torsten Wiesel
#79. [Adolf] Hitler needed, he didn't want to kill Jews, he wanted to expel German Jews, and therefore it's not entirely corroborating your theory.
Elie Wiesel
#80. I needed to know that there was such a thing as love and that it brought smiles and joy in its wake.
Elie Wiesel
#81. Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.
Elie Wiesel
#82. 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 pages are there. Only you don't see them.
Elie Wiesel
#83. I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
Elie Wiesel
#84. 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
#85. How was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted by the enemy?
Elie Wiesel
#86. You shouldn't act as a spokesperson for someone who's trying to impose his will on you.
Elie Wiesel
#87. The Jewish tradition of learning-is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality.
Elie Wiesel
#88. The main theme remains constant: man owes it to himself to reject despair; better to rely on miracles than opt for resignation. By changing himself, man can change the world.
Elie Wiesel
#90. In 1983, I became the Vincent and Brook Astor Professor at The Rockefeller University, where I established a new Laboratory of Neurobiology and continued my close collaboration with Charles Gilbert on the circuitry of primary visual cortex.
Torsten Wiesel
#91. After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more.
Elie Wiesel
#92. Every moment contains a spark of eternity.
Elie Wiesel
#93. I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.
Elie Wiesel
#94. NIGHT. No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.
Elie Wiesel
#95. 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
#96. Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed.
Elie Wiesel
#97. The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.
Elie Wiesel
#99. In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
Elie Wiesel
#100. Aside from my work, my interests lie in the arts and in world affairs.
Torsten Wiesel
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