Elie Wiesel Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

Man's strength resides in his capacity and desire to elevate himself, so as to attain the good. To travel step by step toward the heights. And that is all he can do. To reach heaven and remain there is beyond his powers: Even Moses had to return to earth. Is it the same for evil?

Elie Wiesel
I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone—terribly alone in a world without God and without man.

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 I moved away from the theme of the Holocaust it was to protect it. I didn't want to abuse words; I didn't want to repeat words. I want to surround the subject with a fence of kedushah, of sacredness. To me the sanctuary of Jewish history is there; therefore I wrote other things in order not to write about that.

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
It was pitch dark. I could hear only the violin, and it was as though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings—his last hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again...When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse.

Elie Wiesel
Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

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
Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.

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
To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Elie Wiesel
He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming out base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more...

Elie Wiesel
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.

Elie Wiesel
The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.

Elie Wiesel
I did not weep, and it pained me that i could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched it, I might perhaps have found something like--free at last!

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

Elie Wiesel
It's up to you now, and we shall help you - that my past does not become your future.

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

Elie Wiesel
When you see the abyss, and we have looked into it, then what? There isn't much room at the edge – one person, another, not many. If you are there, others cannot be there. If you are there, you become a protective wall. What happens? You become part of the abyss.

Elie Wiesel
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.

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

Elie Wiesel