Quotes from Elie Wiesel

And to write is to sow and to reap at the same time.

Barack Obama

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

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.

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.

In the beginning there was faith - which is childish; trust - which is vain; and illusion - which is dangerous.

[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it.

God made (human beings) because he loves stories.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.

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

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

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.

Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?

Of course, afterward, I studied [commentary on the Bible by a Rabbi Moshe Dessauer] more closely. But, in truth, it doesn't touch me. It doesn't change my attitude toward the text.

Whether every story that's there [in the Bible] is a historic truth ... Again, I'm not concerned.

I have one request: may I never use my reason against truth.

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.

We didn't really differ [with Frank Moore Cross] because we have the same love of the text. We share that love.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

Love makes everything complicated.

For the good of all, I say: Be careful, the brutality of the world must not be more powerful or attractive than love and friendship.