Elie Wiesel Quotes
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.
• Never shall I forget that first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, ... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.”
• Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
• Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
• Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
• Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
• Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
• 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.
• Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
• 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.
• This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century -- solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of 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.
• I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
• I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
• In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
• 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.
• I write to understand as much as to be understood.
• Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.
• Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
• Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.
• Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
• No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.
• Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
• Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.
• 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.
• No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
• Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
• Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
• Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
• Some stories are true that never happened.
• Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
• Peace is our gift to each other.
• There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
• That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
• A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
• There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
• We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.