Elie Wiesel Quotes

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Elie Wiesel

Profession : Novelist

Birth : September 30, 1928

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

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

When I was young I lost everything.

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

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.

Elie Wiesel

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

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

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

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

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

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

Elie Wiesel

One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.

Elie Wiesel

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.

Elie Wiesel

If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

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

Elie Wiesel

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

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

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 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