Elie Wiesel's Quotes

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

When I was young I lost everything.

Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

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 are there. Only you don't see them.

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

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.

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

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

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 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.

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

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

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

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

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

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

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

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

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

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

Some stories are true that never happened.

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.

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.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

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.

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