Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. We’ve shared a good collection of Elie Wiesel quotes on hope, silence, night, God, holocaust, faith.
Elie Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighetu Marmației, Romania, and died on July 2, 2016, in Manhattan, New York, United States. His wife’s name is Marion Erster Rose.
Elie Wiesel quotes
There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win. – Elie Wiesel
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
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
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
In Jewish history, there are no coincidences. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. – Elie Wiesel
Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds. – Elie Wiesel
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems. – Elie Wiesel
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
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. – Elie Wiesel
We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else. – Elie Wiesel
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
Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another. – Elie Wiesel
In any society, fanatics who hate don’t hate only me – they hate you, too. They hate everybody. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world. – Elie Wiesel
Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people have such an obsession with memory. – Elie Wiesel
After all, God is God because he remembers. – Elie Wiesel
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed. – Elie Wiesel
No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. – Elie Wiesel
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life. – Elie Wiesel
Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. – Elie Wiesel
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
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future. – Elie Wiesel
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone – and, ultimately, hating himself or herself. – Elie Wiesel
When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. – Elie Wiesel
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
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. – Elie Wiesel
Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other. – Elie Wiesel
Destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent. – Elie Wiesel
I love teaching. – Elie Wiesel
Religion is not a man’s relationship with God, it is man’s relationship to man. – Elie Wiesel
One always goes back to one’s childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surroundings. Very religious. – Elie Wiesel
The Bible is not only laws, it’s also stories. – Elie Wiesel
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling. – Elie Wiesel
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from. – Elie Wiesel
When I was young I lost everything. – Elie Wiesel
Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments. – Elie Wiesel
I’ve given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
The Bible is not only laws, it’s also stories. It begins, ‘In the beginning God created Heaven.’ If I had written these words, I wouldn’t have written anything else; it’s just enough. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom, and serve it. – Elie Wiesel
If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am. – Elie Wiesel
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
It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn’t have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself, or anyone, by the very fact, that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact. – Elie Wiesel
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
Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army. – Elie Wiesel
I have to be self-conscious about what I’m trying to do with my life. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
I believe in superstitions. You don’t talk about a child who hasn’t been born. – Elie Wiesel
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table. – Elie Wiesel
I do not belong to this world. I continue to write everything in longhand. If I have to see something on the Internet, I ask my secretary or students. I am lucky because I have people who do it for me. – Elie Wiesel
I don’t know much about politics, and I don’t want to know. That’s why I rarely involve myself in politics. – Elie Wiesel
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness. – Elie Wiesel
I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine. – Elie Wiesel
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
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning. – Elie Wiesel
I’m a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it’s easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it. – Elie Wiesel
I never felt any attraction to violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language. – 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
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
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. – Elie Wiesel
I’ll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it. – Elie Wiesel
Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence. – Elie Wiesel
In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of the Bible and Talmud, and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn’t instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism. – Elie Wiesel
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. – Elie Wiesel
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