Top 180 Elie Wiesel Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There are those who tell me that I survived in order to write this text. I am not convinced. I don’t know how I survived; I was weak, rather shy; I did nothing to save myself. A miracle? Certainly not. If heaven could or would perform a miracle for me, why not for others more deserving than myself? It was nothing more than chance. However, having survived, I needed to give some meaning to my survival.”

— Elie Wiesel

102. “Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die.”

— Elie Wiesel

103. “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.”

— Elie Wiesel

104. “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.”

— Elie Wiesel

105. “I didn’t know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.”

— Elie Wiesel

106. “I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.”

— Elie Wiesel

107. “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.”

— Elie Wiesel

108. “We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to him.”

— Elie Wiesel

109. “It is obvious that the war which Hitler and his accomplices waged was a war not only against Jewish men, women, and children, but also against Jewish religion, Jewish culture, Jewish tradition, therefore Jewish memory.”

— Elie Wiesel

110. “And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him. “I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.”

— Elie Wiesel

111. “Love that makes everything complicated. While hate simplifies everything. Hatred puts accents on things and beings, and on what separates them. Love erases accents.”

— Elie Wiesel

112. “In retrospect I must confess that I do not know, or no longer know, what I wanted to achieve with my words. I only know that without this testimony, my life as a writer – or my life, period – would not have become what it is: that of a witness who believes he has a moral obligation to try to prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory.”

— Elie Wiesel

113. “For us it meant true equality: nakedness. We trembled in the cold. A.”

— Elie Wiesel

114. “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

115. “Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?”

— Elie Wiesel

116. “After trampling over many bodies and corpses, we succeeded in getting inside. We let ourselves fall to the ground.”

— Elie Wiesel

117. “Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.”

— Elie Wiesel

118. “Look, whatever you do in life, remember, think higher and feel deeper. It cannot be bad if you do that.”

— Elie Wiesel

119. “As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life 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

120. “Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.”

— Elie Wiesel

121. “In fact, the question has haunted me for a long time: Does life have meaning after Auschwitz? In a universe cursed because it is guilty, is hope still possible? For a young survivor whose knowledge of life and death surpasses that of his elders, wouldn’t suicide be as great a temptation as love or faith?”

— Elie Wiesel

122. “It was neither German nor Jew who ruled the ghetto – it was illusion.”

— Elie Wiesel

123. “One German officer lived in the house opposite ours. He had a room with the Kahn family. They said he was a charming man – calm, likable, polite, and sympathetic. Three days after he moved in he brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced.”

— Elie Wiesel

124. “We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.”

— Elie Wiesel

125. “We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear.”

— Elie Wiesel

126. “All my life, until today, I have been content to ask questions. All the while knowing that the real questions, those that concern the creator and his creation, have no answers. I’ll go even farther and say that there is a level at which only the questions are eternal, the answers never are. And so, the patient that I am, more charitable, repeats: ‘Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as in the answers.”

— Elie Wiesel

127. “All this under a magnificent blue sky.”

— Elie Wiesel

128. “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.”

— Elie Wiesel

129. “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 freedome depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.”

— Elie Wiesel

130. “Which is better, truth that is a lie or the lie that is truth?”

— Elie Wiesel

131. “The condemned man’s traditional last meal is a joke,” I said loudly, “a joke in the worst possible taste, an insult to the corpse that he is about to be. What does a man care if he dies with an empty stomach?” The.”

— Elie Wiesel

132. “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

— Elie Wiesel

133. “I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.”

— Elie Wiesel

134. “I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man’s, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle’s stead. “I am young”, he said, “and stronger than he.” He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating.”

— Elie Wiesel

135. “You see, Doctor, what people say is true: man carries his fiercest enemy within himself. Hell isn’t others. It’s ourselves.”

— Elie Wiesel

136. “You are the sum total of all that we have been,” said the youngster who looked like my former self. “In a way we are the ones to execute John Dawson. Because you can’t do it without us. Now, do you see?” I was beginning to understand. An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.”

— Elie Wiesel

137. “No one is Sighet suspected that our fate was already sealed. In Berlin we had been condemned, but we didn’t know it. We didn’t know that a man called Adolf Eichmann was already in Budapest weaving his black web, at the head of an elite, efficient detachment of thirty-five SS men, planning the operation that wold crown his career; or that all the necessary means for “dealing with” us were already at hand in a place called Birkenau.”

— Elie Wiesel

138. “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. Or not.”

— Elie Wiesel

139. “All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.”

— Elie Wiesel

140. “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 pages are there. Only you don’t see them.”

— Elie Wiesel

141. “Indifference always helps the aggressor, never his victims. And what is memory if not a noble and necessary response to and against indifference?”

— Elie Wiesel

142. “He struggles to understand why fate has spared him and not so many others. Was it to know happiness? His happiness will never be complete. To know love? He will never be sure of being worthy of love. A part of him is still back there, on the other side, where the dead deny the living the right to leave them behind. His recovery will be a road into exile, a journey in which the touch of the woman he loves will matter less than the image of his grandmother buried under a mountain of ashes.”

— Elie Wiesel

143. “Only fanatics – in religion as well as in politics – can find a meaning in someone else’s death.”

— Elie Wiesel

144. “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

145. “What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

147. “Humanity would never tolerate it.”

— Elie Wiesel

148. “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. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.”

— Elie Wiesel

149. “You shouldn’t act as a spokesperson for someone who’s trying to impose his will on you.”

— Elie Wiesel

150. “I don’t know whether or not we’ll meet again, Gregor. I could, with an effort, look into the future, but the time’s too short. I’d like you to know only this: separation contains as much of a mystery as meeting. In both cases a door opens: in meeting it opens on the future, in separation on the past. It’s the same door.”

— Elie Wiesel