Elie Wiesel Quotes

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They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

Elie Wiesel
The most important question a human being has to face... What is it? The question, Why are we here?

Elie Wiesel
Man walks the moon but his soul remains riveted to earth. Once upon a time it was the opposite.

Elie Wiesel
All my writing was born out of anger. In order to contain it, I had to write. If I had not written, I would have exploded.

Elie Wiesel
Just as there are predatory birds, so there are predatory ideas: I came under their spell....Just as the survivors say that no one will ever understand the victims, what I must tell you is that you will never understand the executioners.

Elie Wiesel
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
We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" — whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem — anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually.

Elie Wiesel
Some writings could sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

Elie Wiesel
What is abnormal is that I am normal. 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.

Elie Wiesel
Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.

Elie Wiesel
If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.

Elie Wiesel
Some events do take place but are not true;
others are, although they never occurred.

Elie Wiesel
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
As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

Elie Wiesel
Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.

Elie Wiesel
God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here.
At Auschwitz

Elie Wiesel
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.

Elie Wiesel
Drawn to childhood, the old man will seek it in a thousand different ways.

Elie Wiesel
Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Elie Wiesel
If there is a single theme that dominates all my writings, all my obsessions, it is that of memory-because I fear forgetfulness as much as hatred and death.

Elie Wiesel
I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction--the Messiah.

Elie Wiesel
[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
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
Man asks and God replies but we don't understand his replies because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.

Elie Wiesel
The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.

Elie Wiesel
What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?

Elie Wiesel
If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?

Elie Wiesel
The yellow star?
Oh well, what of it?
You don't die of it.

Elie Wiesel
The impact of the holocaust on believers as well as unbelievers, on Jews as well as Christians, has not yet been evaluated. Not deeply, not enough.

Elie Wiesel
The deeper the nostalgia and the more complete the fear, the purer, the richer the word and the secret.

Elie Wiesel