Quotes By 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.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

For me, every hour is grace.

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.

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.

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

Some stories are true that never happened.

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

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 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.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

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

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.

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

When I was young I lost everything.

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

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

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.