Elie Wiesel Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

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

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.

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

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

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

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

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.

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.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

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.

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.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

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

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.

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

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.

I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.

I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.

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.

I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.

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.

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 never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.

When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.

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.

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

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.

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 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.

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.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.

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.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn't have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself or anyone, by the very fact that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.

Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.

One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.

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.

If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.

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.

Night. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.

Never have the relations between Jews and Catholics been as good.

Simply because, one hand, there are the haters, ... The hater has power. ... All we can do is oppose it, or one becomes an accomplice.

I am so in favor of being involved in other people's causes, other people's fights. If a people is oppressed, we must help those people free themselves.

From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

I had a teacher that always told me, 'Don't promise, because if you promise, you must keep it.' I promised, so here I am.

I always believed that to listen to a witness is to become a witness.

He had so examined his past that he could no longer look at it with enough detachment to tell what was true and what wasn't,

Peace is not God's gift to his creatures. It is our gift to each other.

We are here to let the Jewish state and its brave, beleaguered citizens and its valiant soldiers know that they are not alone.

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

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

Every moment is a new beginning.

Nevertheless, we are led to believe that true words can communicate more than truth, they communicate what life is all about, that it's threatened, when it's threatened, when it's in danger, then it becomes a curse or a blessing.

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.

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].

You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.

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.

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

If anyone had told us in 1945 that there are certain battles we'll have to fight again we wouldn't have believed it. Racism, anti-Semitism, starvation of children and, who would have believed that? At least I was convinced then, naively, that at least something happened in history that, because of myself, certain things cannot happen again.

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

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

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.