Top 565 Quotes & Sayings by Elie Wiesel - Page 3

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

What is man? Hope turned to dust. No. What is man? Dust turned to hope.

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.

Eternity is the place where questions and answers become one.

Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.

A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering... The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.

To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice

This is the role of writers: to turn their tears into a story - and perhaps into a prayer.

Once upon a time refugee meant somebody who has a refuge, found a place, a haven where he could find refuge.

Every moment contains a spark of eternity.

An indifference to suffering makes humans inhuman

Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. 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.

Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees.

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

I came to the conclusion that I am free to choose my own suffering. But I am not free to consent to someone else's suffering.

My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

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

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

Every single human being is a unique human being. And, therefore, it's so criminal to do something to that human being, because he or she represents humanity.

[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.

For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future.

..you do not leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, you are taking it with you.

For nearly 3,500 years Exodus has left such an imprint on people's memories that I cannot imagine it had been invented just as a legend or a tale.

You’re shaking … so am I. It’s because of Jerusalem, isn’t it? One doesn’t go to Jerusalem, one returns to it. That’s one of its mysteries.

A religious person answers to God, not to the elected or non-elected official.

I have no doubt that faith is only pure when it does not negate the faith of another. I have no doubt that evil can be fought and that indifference is no option. I have no doubt that fanaticism is dangerous. And of all the books in the world on life, I have no doubt that the life of one person weighs more than them all.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else’s death.

Anything you want to say about God you better make sure you can say in front of a pit of burning babies.

Bite your lips, little brother...Don't cry. Keep your anger, your hate, for another day, for later. The day will come but not now...Wait. Clench your teeth and wait.

Whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story. That is his duty.

Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark.

Suffering pulls us farther away from other human beings. It builds a wall made of cries and contempt to separate us.

Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German.

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

For us it's not easy to be conformist, I cannot stand to be conformist, I don't accept what it is, I like to say no. If I see an injustice I scream.

Human beings all change. Not what they are but who they are. We have the power to change what we do with our life and turn it into our destiny.

Indifference is the sign of sickness, a sickness of the soul more contagious than any other.

The darkest days in my life after the war, after the war, was when I discovered that the ... most of the members and commanders of the Einsatz group that were doing the killings, not even in gas chambers, but killing with machine guns, had college degrees from German universities and PhD's and MD's. Couldn't believe it.

I was there when God was put on trial....At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.

Write only if you cannot live without writing. Write only what you alone can write.

None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.

My good friends, we are all waiting. We are waiting, if not for the Messiah, as such, we are waiting for the messianic moment. And the messianic moment is what each and every one of us tries to build, meaning a certain area of humanity that links us to all those who are human and, therefore, desperately trying to fight despair as humanly as possible and - I hope - with some measure of success.

How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.

In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.

Only the guilty are guilty: the children of killers are not killers, but children.

We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

I think this century more than any other really has seen the phenomenon of people being uprooted in such numbers, such a degree. They even have a word for it: The refugees. It's a new word, a 20th Century word, but refugee is actually a misnomer.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

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

Because I survived, I must do everything possible to help others.

Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the happiness and humanity of the human being.