Quotes by Elie Wiesel
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We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.

Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.

I belong to a tradition that believes that the death of a single child is a blemish on creation.

I think he is condemned by himself to loneliness. God is One: he was, he is, he will be always One. One is so lonely. Maybe that is why he created human beings -- to feel less lonely. But as human beings betray his creation, he may become even lonelier.

I spent most of my time talking to God more than to people.

What is Scripture? The Hebrew word is torah. Torah means teaching, learning.

God made human beings because he loves stories.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

The primary task of a Jew in turbulent times is to be Jewish.

Nevertheless, we are led to believe that true words can communicate more than truth, they communicate what life is all about, that it's threatened, when it's threatened, when it's in danger, then it becomes a curse or a blessing.

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

Usually I get up early every morning and from 6:00 to 10:00 I write. The rest of the time I study and prepare my work or I do other things. But four hours a day are exclusively devoted to writing.

Certain things, certain events, seem inexplicable only for a time: up to the moment when the veil is torn aside.

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.

I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes were open and I was alone -- terribly alone in a world without God and without (hu)man(ity).

I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.

It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto -- it was illusion.

As you know, I describe Shirat ha-Yam as part of an epic story that has qualities of history and which also has qualities of the mythological, of an epic.

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.

And action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.

Whatever we thought was certain is no longer certain, and therefore in science probably certain things must be correct, but in human behaviour I am not so sure.

This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused.

Am I my brother's keeper? There you have the whole Biblical understanding that you are your brother's keeper. You also have a whole other understanding in which you are not your brother's keeper. And I've heard some extremely bright people take this position.

I think Sacrifice of Isaac is the most important event in the Bible except for Sinai.

The story of the Sacrifice of Isaac is much more a part of theology than of history.

The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac are nowhere in any other tradition.

If you make a determination that story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac is not historical, do you throw it away? I don't think we can say whether it's precisely, scientifically historical.

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.

When I see a child who is hungry, I see a person who is humiliated.

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.

For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship.

Go over to Greece with the Iliad and Odyssey. These have elements of history, and they have non-historical elements. It's very difficult to pull them apart. And I think there's not much reason to.

I've organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn't help but at least they explored it.

You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.

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

I imagine, like all his predecessors, Barak Obama would like to achieve greatness in bringing peace in the Middle East. I hope it will not be at the expense of Israel.

In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves.

The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.

In Talmudic literature, certainly in the beginning, he was like a human being -- except he was a serpent. But he was talking and walking and probably dreaming.

I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

When I see what is happening all over the world today -- the violence -- the stupid, arrogant, grotesque violence that is dominating humankind. I cannot not remember that there were other times, of course the Second World War. I never compare.

The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

I would hesitate to give advice to the Dalai Lama and his people because they are suffering. The Dalai Lama suffered from exile and the people in Tibet suffer from oppression.

Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency.

What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is -- to use a word scholars love -- problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue.

I think so. 9 11 has been a turning point in American history, there's no doubt about that.

London radio, which we listened to every evening, announced encouraging news: the daily bombings of Germany and Stalingrad, the preparation of the Second Front. And so we, the Jews of Sighet, waited for better days that surely were soon to come.

Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.

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.

The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.

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.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

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

When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, 'why didn't you discover the cure for such and such? why didn't you become the Messiah?' The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is 'why didn't you become you?'

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

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.

Today there isn't a university where they don't have special courses Jewish studies or Holocaust studies, hundreds and hundreds of universities, young people today want to know more than their elders did, much more, and therefore I am very optimistic about young people.

I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.

There is Israel, for us at least. What no other generation had, we have. We have Israel in spite of all the dangers, the threats and the wars, we have Israel. We can go to Jerusalem. Generations and generations could not and we can.

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.

Every moment is a new beginning.

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

The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.

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.

Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.

What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.

No human being is illegal.

Every nation has its prestigious military academies -- or so few of them -- that reach not only the virtues of peace but also the art of attaining it? I mean attaining and protecting it by means other than weapons, the tools of war. Why are we surprised whenever war recedes and yields to peace?

Whatever you think in life... think higher and feel deeper.

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

The opposite of love is not hate; it's indifference.

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.

Think higher, feel deeper.

No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.

One person of integrity can make a difference.

If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven -- from their sadness to their hope.

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me -- they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

I never teach the same course twice.

When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.

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.