Elie Wiesel famous quotes

Every moment is a new beginning.
-- Elie Wiesel

#New Beginnings #Positivity #Moments

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Unique #Humanity #Criminals

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

#Israel #America #Weapons

If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Pain #Loneliness #Suffering

Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Neutrality #Sides #Helping

I cannot cure everybody. I cannot help everybody. But to tell the lonely person that I am not far or different from that lonely person, that I am with him or her, that's all I think we can do and we should do.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Lonely #Thinking #Different

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Suffering #Silent #Endure

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Life #Despair #Remember

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

#Dream #Heart #Past

I write to understand as much as to be understood.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Writing #Understanding #Literature

Even in darkness it is possible to create light.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Positivity #Light #Darkness

One person of integrity can make a difference.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Integrity #Differences #Making A Difference

No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?
-- Elie Wiesel

#Beautiful #Skinny #Contradiction

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

#Men #Genocide #Destruction

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

#Motivational #Fitness #Exercise

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

#Hurt #Bystanders #Silence

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Dream #Night #Men

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

#Past #Want #My Past

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

#Freedom #Philosophy #Military

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

#Inspirational #Life #Success

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Believe #Tradition #Share

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Killers #Victim #Concentration

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

#Believe #Serious #Endeavor

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Christian #Heart #Israel

People become the stories they hear and the stories they tell.
-- Elie Wiesel

#People #Stories

Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations — not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Children #People #Murder

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Peace #History #Silence

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Secret #Triumph #Treasure

Questions outlive the answers.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Answers

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

#Giving #Meaning Of Life #Overcoming

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

#Silence #Grace #Quality

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Death #Winning #Men

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
-- Elie Wiesel

#World #Changing The World #Protect

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Life #Power #Evil

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Memories #People #Holocaust

War is like night, she said. It covers everything.
-- Elie Wiesel

#War #Night #Said

Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Positivity #Hands #Waiting

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Inspirational #Life #Truth

Some stories are true that never happened.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Love #Dream #Writing

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

#Inspirational #Positive #Encouraging

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Inspirational #Responsibility #Men

I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Believe #Men #Enemy

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

#Memories #Civilization #Would Be

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Compassion #Suffering #Faces

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

#Illusion #Vain #Dangerous

Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Peace #Remember #Mankind

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Philosophy #Knowledge #Mean

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Beautiful #Girl #Writing

Hunger is isolating; it may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination; it even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Memories #Real #Imagination

The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Opposites #Life Is #Indifference

To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Sin #Silent #Indifferent

The knowledge that I have acquired must not remain imprisoned in my brain. I owe it to many men and women to do something with it. I feel the need to pay back what was given to me. Call it gratitude.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Gratitude #Men #Brain

How can a human being be illegal?
-- Elie Wiesel

#Illegal #Humans

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

#Wells

This is the duty of our generation as we enter the twenty-first century - solidarity with the weak, the persecuted, the lonely, the sick, and those in despair. It is expressed by the desire to give a noble and humanizing meaning to a community in which all members will define themselves not by their own identity but by that of others.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Lonely #Loneliness #Our Generation

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Education #Mean #Birth

No human being is illegal.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Illegal #Humans

Mankind needs peace more than ever, for our entire planet, threatened by nuclear war, is in danger of total destruction. A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Peace #War #Men

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories
-- Elie Wiesel

#Memories #Bears #Responsible

Think higher, feel deeper.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Thinking #Deeper #Feels

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Mark

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Teacher #Teaching #Should

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Night #Long #Firsts

To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice
-- Elie Wiesel

#Holocaust #Forget

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Freedom #Children #Integrity

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. Or not.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Children #Hate #Men

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it . . .
-- Elie Wiesel

#Believe #People #Humanity

After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Father #Touch Me

When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Witness

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Destiny #Turns #Humans

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Heart #Mean #Broken

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain
-- Elie Wiesel

#Writing #Order #Sculpture

There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... one person of integrity can make a difference...
-- Elie Wiesel

#Integrity #Differences #Making A Difference

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Silence

In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest. I love that word.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Beautiful #Quests

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

#Faith #Anger #Holocaust

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Death #Attitude #Indifference

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

#Helping Others #Survival #May

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Death #Holocaust #Doe

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

#Holocaust #Would Be #Forget

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Men #Suffering #Concern

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Memories #Ends #Source

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

#Faith #Religious #Race

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Gratitude #Mean #Night

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Book #Writing #Two

I shall always remember that smile. From what world did it come from?
-- Elie Wiesel

#World #Remember

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

#Memories #Remembrance #Principles

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

#Inspirational #Writing

For me, every hour is grace.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Grace #Hours

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Life #Friendship #Relationship

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Coffee #Waiting #Tradition

Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?
-- Elie Wiesel

#Hate #Killing

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.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Jerusalem #Return #Mystery

He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Lying #Answers #Insistence

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Gratitude #Grateful #Missing

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
-- Elie Wiesel

#War #Holocaust #Bears

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

#Problem #Enough #Should

I feel that books, just like people, have a destiny. Some invite sorrow, others joy, some both.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Book #Destiny #People

Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must - at that moment - become the center of the universe.
-- Elie Wiesel

#Inspirational #Men #Race