Elie Wiesel was a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books, written mostly in French and English, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. This Elie Wiesel quotes on faith, memory, silence will motivate you.
Best Elie Wiesel Quotes
- “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “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.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” ~ Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel quotes on silence
- “Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness. Not only are we responsible for the memories of the dead, we are responsible for what we do with those memories” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “I still believe in man in spite of man. I believe in language even though it has been wounded, deformed, and perverted by the enemies of mankind. And I continue to cling to words because it is up to us to transform them into instruments of comprehension rather than contempt. It is up to us to choose whether we wish to use them to curse or to heal, to wound or to console.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “… True, we are often too weak to stop injustices; but the least we can do is to protest against them. True, we are too poor to eliminate hunger; but in feeding one child, we protest against hunger. True, we are too timid and powerless to take on all the guards of all the political prisons in the world; but in offering our solidarity to one prisoner we denounce all the tormentors. True, we are powerless against death; but as long as we help one man, one woman, one child live one hour longer in safety and dignity, we affirm man’s [woman’s] right to live.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“In order to fly, you have to give up the ground you are standing on.”
- “Be careful with words, they’re dangerous. Be wary of them. They begat either demons or angels. It’s up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as giving free rein to words” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Even in darkness it is possible to create light.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “I believe that all the survivors are mad. One time or another their madness will explode. You cannot absorb that much madness and not be influenced by it. That is why the children of survivors are so tragic. I see them in school. They don’t know how” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. Indifference creates evil. Hatred is evil itself. Indifference is what allows evil to be strong, what gives it power.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “No human being is illegal. That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember. The main thing is to teach them where not to go. Oppression, not to go; dictatorship, not to go; racism and prejudice, absolutely not to go. This is a moral plan [for society].” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, ‘why didn’t you discover the cure for such and such? why didn’t you become the Messiah?’ The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is ‘why didn’t you become you?'” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“Every moment is a new beginning.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Think higher, feel deeper.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “What is man?
Hope turned to dust.
No.
What is man?
Dust turned to hope.” ~ Elie Wiesel - “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.”
- “Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “you can do something. You can, even for one person Don’t turn away; help. Because those who suffer, often suffer not because of the person or the group that inflicts the suffering; they seem to suffer because nobody cares.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Will you join me in hearing the case for keeping weapons from those who preach death to Israel and America?” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, that person comes first. One’s very suffering gives one priority. . . . To watch over one who grieves is a more urgent duty than to think of God.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“One person of integrity can make a difference.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “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.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “I write to understand as much as to be understood.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Every single human being is a unique human being. And, therefore, it’s so criminal to do something to that human being, because he or she represents humanity.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“Life is not a fist. Life is an open hand waiting for some other hand to enter it.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “In the word question, there is a beautiful word – quest. I love that word. We are all partners in a quest. The essential questions have no answers. You are my question, and I am yours – and then there is dialogue. The moment we have answers, there is no dialogue. Questions unite people.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Education in the key to preventing the cycle of violence and hatred that marred the 20th century from repeating itself in the 21st century.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “In the word question, there is a beautiful word – quest. I love that word.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “There is much to be done, there is much that can be done… One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.” ~ Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel quotes on night
- “There is much to be done, there is much that can be done… one person of integrity can make a difference.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “A Jew must be sensitive to the pain of all human beings. A Jew cannot remain indifferent to human suffering… The mission of the Jewish people has never been to make the world more Jewish, but to make it more human.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Once upon a time refugee meant somebody who has a refuge, found a place, a haven where he could find refuge.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Every moment contains a spark of eternity.” ~ Elie Wiesel
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“To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.” ~ Elie Wiesel Quotes
- “We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children. Between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “Emphasis must be put on learning: there is no substitute to education. It can be briefly formulated in a few words: always, whatever you do in life, think higher and feel deeper.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “For us it’s not easy to be conformist, I cannot stand to be conformist, I don’t accept what it is, I like to say no. If I see an injustice I scream.” ~ Elie Wiesel
- “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.” ~ Elie Wiesel
