Quotes from Elie Wiesel

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

The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.

The opposite of faith is not heresy but indifference

My faith is a wounded faith, but it's not without faith. My life is not without faith.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps.

Whatever you think in life... think higher and feel deeper.

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.

My faith is a wounded faith, but my life is not without faith. I didn't divorce God, but I'm quarrelling and arguing and questioning, it's a wounded faith.

Human beings all change. Not what they are but who they are. We have the power to change what we do with our life and turn it into our destiny.

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.

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

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

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

Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

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

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.

We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.

Therefore, all my adult life, since I began my life as an author, or as a teacher, I always try to listen to the victim.

My ambition really was, even as a child, to be a writer, a commentator, and a teacher, but a teacher of Talmud.

For the purpose of my life, I don't ask the question. First of all, I believe. I think the Five Books of Moses are inspired. Call it divine. I don't know. But I would certainly call it inspired.

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

It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain.

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.