Top 565 Quotes & Sayings by Elie Wiesel
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Elie Wiesel.
Last updated on April 13, 2025.
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.
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.
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
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.
Peace is our gift to each other.
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.
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
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.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.
I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
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.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
When I was young I lost everything.
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
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.
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.
I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
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.
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.
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.
Some stories are true that never happened.
Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
For me, every hour is grace.
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.
I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.
I write to understand as much as to be understood.
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.
I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.
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.
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.
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.
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
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.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
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.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
H. L. Mencken Quotes
American
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer