Elie Wiesel Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions.

Elie Wiesel
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
But the forces of evil have not abdicated. The malevolent ghosts of hatred are resurgent with a fury and a boldness that are as astounding as they are nauseating: ethnic conflicts, religious riots, anti-Semitic incidents here, there, and everywhere. What is wrong with these morally degenerate people that they abuse their freedom, so recently won?

Elie Wiesel
One more stab to the heart, one more reason to hate. One less reason to live.

Elie Wiesel
Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.

Elie Wiesel
The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.

Elie Wiesel
After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again.

Elie Wiesel
I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.

Elie Wiesel
Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and 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. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.

Elie Wiesel
I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.

Elie Wiesel
There are moments when I think it will never end, that it will last indefinitely. It's like the rain. Here the rain, like everything else, suggests permanence and eternity. I say to myself: it's raining today and it's going to rain tomorrow and the next day, the next week and the next century.

Elie Wiesel
In this place of darkness and malediction we can but stand in awe and remember its stateless, faceless and nameless victims. Close your eyes and look: endless nocturnal processions are converging here, and here it is always night. Here heaven and earth are on fire.

Elie Wiesel
Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.

Elie Wiesel
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
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

Elie Wiesel
What is good for me is not necessarily good for someone else. Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word. The hesitation between one word and another is filled with many centuries, much space.

Elie Wiesel
I didn't want to write a book on the Holocaust. To write such a book, to be responsible for such experiences, for such words — I didn't want that. I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.

Elie Wiesel
We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything—death, fatigue, our natural needs. Stronger than cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.

Elie Wiesel
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
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.

Elie Wiesel
I am myself only when I work. I work for four hours without interruption. Then I stop for my studies. But these four hours are really mine.

Elie Wiesel
It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.

Elie Wiesel
600,000 to 800,00 human beings were murdered. We know now, as we knew then, they could have been saved, and they were not.
Recalling the genocide in Rwanda

Elie Wiesel
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