Quotes from Elie Wiesel

All this under a magnificent blue sky.

Some of life's moments mark a break in consciousness; others give rise to streams of scintillating, philosophical ideas or astonishing works of art; still others, to important meeting or profound personal upheavals.

To live is to betray the dead. We hasten to bury and forget them because we are ashamed; we feel guilty towards them.

I believe it was Jean Améry who noted that the first to bow to the oppressor's system and to adopt its doctrines and methods were the intellectuals. But not all of them. Not the rabbis and priests, who, after all, were intellectuals too. With a single exception, no rabbi agreed to become a kapo. All refused to barter their own survival by becoming tools of the hangman. All preferred to die rather than serve death. The lessons of the prophets and the sages became shields for them. On

The opposite of LOVE is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of ART is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of FAITH is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of LIFE is not DEATH, it's indifference

Once we begin to regard the well-being of others as integral to our own, we overcome the paralysis of competing rights, which rationalizes innocent suffering.

The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors.

I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.

The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?

Do you know what that means? 'Man of God.' An odd name, isn't it? It teaches us that what we call angels are only men. There are no real angels. And men? Oh, there are men, all right, unfortunately for the angels and for ourselves. And what is worse is that they are real.

I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice. Akiba

hatred is never an answer, and ... death nullifies all answers. There is nothing sacred, nothing uplifting, in hatred or in death.

You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn't others. It's ourselves.

The most vital lesson to be learned from the Holocaust era is that Auschwitz was possible because the enemy suceeded in dividing, in separating, in splitting human society, nation against nation, Christian against Jew, young against old. And not enough people cared.

To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands.

Night. No one prayed, so that the night would pass quickly. The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us. Should that fire die out one day, there would be nothing left in the sky but dead stars, dead eyes.

He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer … Man

I don't know whether or not we'll meet again, Gregor. I could, with an effort, look into the future, but the time's too short. I'd like you to know only this: separation contains as much of a mystery as meeting. In both cases a door opens: in meeting it opens on the future, in separation on the past. It's the same door.

THE BELOVED OBJECTS that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions. Every