Elie Wiesel Quotes

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

— Elie Wiesel

“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. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

“There's a long road of suffering ahead of you. But don't lose courage. You've already escaped the gravest danger: selection. So now, muster your strength, and don't lose heart. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life. Above all else, have faith. Drive out despair, and you will keep death away from yourselves. Hell is not for eternity. And now, a prayer - or rather, a piece of advice: let there be comradeship among you. We are all brothers, and we are all suffering the same fate. The same smoke floats over all our heads. Help one another. It is the only way to survive.”

— Elie Wiesel

“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”

— Elie Wiesel

Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because he kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

— Elie Wiesel

God is God because he remembers.

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

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

“Questions outlive the answers.”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

“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

“Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers.”

— Elie Wiesel

Then the train resumed its journey, leaving in its wake, in a snowy field in Poland, hundreds of naked orphans without a tomb.

— Elie Wiesel

“I did not deny God's existence, but I doubted his absolute justice.”

— Elie Wiesel

“Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.”

— Elie Wiesel

Oh God, Master of the Universe, in your infinite compassion, have mercy on us ...

— Elie Wiesel

“There is no discussing theology, sociology and politics when someone is under the spell of a self-enclosed totalitarian ideology. Intentionally or out of ignorance, Ahmed, who is empirical in all matters, detests pointless and laborious philosophical imaginings, never-ending discussions, or clashes of ideas that might be respectful of non-believer opponents and sinners deserving only of complete contempt.”

— Elie Wiesel

“Then he smiled. I shall always remember that smile. What world did it come from? Heavy snow continued to fall over the corpses.”

— Elie Wiesel

“It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.”

— Elie Wiesel

“After trampling over many bodies and corpses, we succeeded in getting inside. We let ourselves fall to the ground.”

— Elie Wiesel

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. "I am young", he said, "and stronger than he." He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating

— Elie Wiesel

Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.

— Elie Wiesel

God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the watchful gaze of this child, vanished forever into the smoke of the human holocaust demanded by the Race, the most voracious of all idols. And

— Elie Wiesel

“He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer ... Man”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.

— Elie Wiesel

“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

“Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.”

— Elie Wiesel

“God means movement, and not explanation.”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

“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

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

— Elie Wiesel

Emphasis must be put on learning: there is no substitute to education. It can be briefly formulated in a few words: always, whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.

— Elie Wiesel

“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.”

— Elie Wiesel

“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.”

— Elie Wiesel

“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.”

— Elie Wiesel

“After my father's death, nothing could touch me any more.”

— Elie Wiesel

“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).”

— Elie Wiesel

“With every cell of my being and with every fiber of my memory I oppose the death penalty in all forms. I do not believe any civilized society should be at the service of death. I don't think it's human to become an agent of the angel of death.”

— Elie Wiesel

“Be careful with words, they're dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It's up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words”

— Elie Wiesel

“Do you know what laughter is? I'll tell you. It's God's mistake. When God made man in order to bend him to his wishes he carelessly gave him the gift of laughter.”

— Elie Wiesel

“The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away.”

— Elie Wiesel

“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 ...”

— Elie Wiesel

“The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.”

— Elie Wiesel

“All those who love thrillers will find in Michael Alexiades's first novel a source of great pleasure and satisfaction. It combines suspense and knowledge, experience and imagination. His grateful readers will now wait for the next.”

— Elie Wiesel

“What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.”

— Elie Wiesel

“My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.”

— Elie Wiesel

“I don't speak about my pain. My pain is something that doesn't need to be purged. I want to prevent people from suffering. I don't speak about my suffering. Suffering is something personal and discreet. Also, I know it will never leave me. I don't want it to leave me. It would be a betrayal.”

— Elie Wiesel