Elie Wiesel Quotes

I describe incidents which may or may not have happened but which are true.

I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.

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

[Shirat ha-Yam ] is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pieces of Biblical literature that we possess. It is much closer to history than later traditions of the Exodus.

Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.

Words can be turned into spears. They can be turned into prayers. It's a strange world that you are in. But you deal with words.

I have an open mind - - I read, I study, I study your work and the work of other people with less talent. But that is not what I do in my writing and teaching. Still the love for the text we have in common.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

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

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

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.

My students are very special. They are my source of pride, my source of joy, my source of hope. I am terribly fond of my students.

As for the discipline, we [me and Frank Moore Cross] belong to two different disciplines. One involves research and archaeological materials. Mine is more interpretive. But it is the love for the text that is there, and that is what makes the whole adventure of reading and studying and sharing worthwhile.

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

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.

Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.

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

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music.

I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.

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.

I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.

Granted that every war is madness-civil war, fratricide, is the worst of all; it reaches deeper into ugliness, cruelty and absurdity.

did everything I could in my life to be immune to hatred, because hatred is a cancer.

Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance.

Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as the answers.

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.

Christians call it the "Sacrifice of Isaac," and Jews call it the "Binding of Isaac."

I don't know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that's why I teach, I've been teaching all my life.

Every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them.

[The Bible] is been my passion almost from my youth.

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

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

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.

You take a text, you explore it, you enter it with all your heart and all your mind.

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

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.

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

The sins I regret the most are the one's I didn't commit.

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

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

It's not hatred that kills people, it's indifference

A Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.

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

I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.

One day - I remember it was a Sabbath afternoon - I came to the synagogue with a book in my hand. I saw a commentary on the Bible by a certain Rabbi Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An elderly man came up to me - I was then maybe 10 or 12. "What are you studying?" he said. "Dessauer's commentaries," I said. So he gave me a slap on my face.

You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.

I would say to [Chinese government], You don't need Tibet really. You don't need all the problems Tibet creates for you. It's so small, so far away. Give them their religious freedom and I know that they wouldn't misuse it.