Quotes by Elie Wiesel (Page 2 of 2)

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.

I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

Peace is our gift to each other.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

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.

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

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.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

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 don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

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.

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.

Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.

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.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

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.

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

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.

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.

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.

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

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.

No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.