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The Great Gatsby
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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Elie Wiesel Quotes

When a person doesn’t have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

– Elie Wiesel

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

– Elie Wiesel

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.

– Elie Wiesel

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.

– Elie Wiesel

I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in ‘Night.’ I questioned God’s silence. So I questioned. I don’t have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.

– Elie Wiesel

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

– Elie Wiesel

I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.

– Elie Wiesel

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

– Elie Wiesel

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

– Elie Wiesel

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.

– Elie Wiesel

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

– Elie Wiesel

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

– Elie Wiesel

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

– Elie Wiesel

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

– Elie Wiesel

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

– Elie Wiesel

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

– Elie Wiesel

Peace is our gift to each other.

– Elie Wiesel

I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.

– Elie Wiesel

I’ll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.

– Elie Wiesel

It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn’t have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself or anyone, by the very fact that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact.

– Elie Wiesel

I don’t like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

– Elie Wiesel

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

– Elie Wiesel

Just as despair can come to one only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

– Elie Wiesel

I believe in superstitions. You don’t talk about a child who hasn’t been born.

– Elie Wiesel

For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.

– Elie Wiesel

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.

– Elie Wiesel

When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.

– Elie Wiesel

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

– Elie Wiesel

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

– Elie Wiesel

For me, every hour is grace.

– Elie Wiesel

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