Elie Wiesel Quotes

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Elie Wiesel

Profession : Novelist

Birth : September 30, 1928

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

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

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

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

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

Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.

Elie Wiesel

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

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

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

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

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

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

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

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Elie Wiesel

Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.

Elie Wiesel

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

Elie Wiesel