Quotes About Hope

OUR FIRST ACT AS FREE MEN was to throw ourselves onto the provisions. That's all we thought about. No thought of revenge, or of parents. Only of bread. And

From Jeff Greenfield: I once asked Elie Wiesel Are you an optimist or a pessimist? An optimist, he said. I have to be.

Whatever you think in life… think higher and feel deeper, be positive.

All this under a magnificent blue sky.

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.

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

Judge God. He created the universe and made justice stem from injustices. He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies…

Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.

I speak from experience that even in darkness, it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. There it is: I still believe in man in spite of man.

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

The news spread through Sighet like wildfire. Soon that was all people talked about. But not for long. Optimism soon revived: The Germans will not come this far. They will stay in Budapest. For strategic reasons, for political reasons … In less than three days, German Army vehicles made their appearance on our streets.

Sion, pour moi, c'était une idée sainte, divine, un espoir messianique, une prière, un battement de coeur—et non un lieu géographique, une réalité politique, une cause au nom de laquelle on meurt ou on tue.

The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded—and devoured—by a black flame.

Et autour d'eux, tant d'amis, tant de frères, tant de camarades, des visages que j'avais connus dans mon enfance et d'autres que j'avais vu vivre et agoniser, espérer et blasphémer, à Buchenwald et à Auschwitz.

A man who has suffered more than others, and differently, should live apart. Alone. Outside of any organized existence. He poisons the air. He makes it unfit for breathing. He takes away from joy its spontaneity and its justification. He kills hope and the will to live. He is the incarnation of time that negates present and future, only recognizing the harsh law of memory. He suffers and his contagious suffering calls forth echoes around him.

There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done.

we had to get up whenever a Kapo came in to check if, by chance, somebody had a new pair of shoes. If so, we had to hand them over. No use protesting; the blows multiplied and, in the end, one still had to hand them over. I had new shoes myself. But as they were covered with a thick coat of mud, they had not been noticed. I thanked God, in an improvised prayer, for having created mud in His infinite and wondrous universe.

Suffering is given to the living, not to the dead," he said looking right through me. "It is man's duty to make it cease, not to increase it. One hour of suffering less is already a victory over fate.

Noapte. Nimeni nu se ruga s? treac? mai repede noaptea. Stelele nu erau decât scânteile marelui foc care ne devora. Dac? acel foc se va stinge într-o zi, pe cer nu va mai fi nimic, nu vor mai fi decât stele stinse, ochi morÅ£i.

London radio, which we listened to every evening, announced encouraging news: the daily bombings of Germany and Stalingrad, the preparation of the Second Front. And so we, the Jews of Sighet, waited for better days that surely were soon to come.

Most people thought that we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

One must not rely on the dead," he said. "One must rely on the living—and on God who gives life to the living.

The Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech Delivered by

The stars were only sparks of the fire which devoured us.