Top 180 Elie Wiesel Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “Dead souls have more to say than living ones.”

— Elie Wiesel

153. “No commandment surpasses the one concerning the liberation of hostages, for they are among the starving, the thirsting, the stripped, always in danger of death.”

— Elie Wiesel

154. “Had the situation not been so tragic, we might have laughed.”

— Elie Wiesel

155. “Remember also that it is not knowledge but the yearning for knowledge that makes for a complete, accomplished man. Such a man does not stand still but perseveres in the face of adversity, nor does he remain untouched by the pain cause by absence. On the contrary, he recognizes himself in each cry, uttered or repressed, in the smallest rift, in the most pressing need.”

— Elie Wiesel

156. “Do you know what that means? ‘Man of God.’ An odd name, isn’t it? It teaches us that what we call angels are only men. There are no real angels. And men? Oh, there are men, all right, unfortunately for the angels and for ourselves. And what is worse is that they are real.”

— Elie Wiesel

157. “What is man? Dust turned to hope.”

— Elie Wiesel

158. “What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?”

— Elie Wiesel

159. “Man prefers to blame himself for all possible sins and crimes rather than come to the conclusion that God is capable of the most flagrant injustice. I still blush every time I think of the way God makes fun of human beings, his favorite toys.”

— Elie Wiesel

160. “The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.”

— Elie Wiesel

161. “If your suffering splashes others, those around you, those for whom you represent a reason to live, then you must kill it, choke it.”

— Elie Wiesel

162. “Love is this and love is that; man is born to love; he is only alive when he is in the presence of a woman he loves or should love.”

— Elie Wiesel

163. “But you get used to anything.”

— Elie Wiesel

164. “Once we begin to regard the well-being of others as integral to our own, we overcome the paralysis of competing rights, which rationalizes innocent suffering.”

— Elie Wiesel

165. “I learned that man lives differently, depending on whether he is in a horizontal or vertical position.”

— Elie Wiesel

166. “To live is to betray the dead. We hasten to bury and forget them because we are ashamed; we feel guilty towards them.”

— Elie Wiesel

167. “On the other hand, how many secular humanists and intellectuals renounced their value system the moment they grasped its futility and uselessness? Sobered, disoriented, and disillusioned, some allowed themselves to be seduced by the ideology of cruelty. The number was significant. The.”

— Elie Wiesel

168. “Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.”

— Elie Wiesel

169. “The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.”

— Elie Wiesel

170. “Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.”

— Elie Wiesel

171. “Dawn is purely a work of fiction, but I wrote it to look at myself in a new way. Obviously I did not live this tale, but I was implicated in its ethical dilemma from the moment that I assumed my character’s place.”

— Elie Wiesel

172. “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.” He.”

— Elie Wiesel

173. “The absolute quality of hate explains any human action even if it throws something inhuman around it.”

— Elie Wiesel

174. “The destiny of people cannot be reduced to a sociological or scientific formula; it contains mysterious, if not mystical factors.”

— Elie Wiesel

175. “How do I find God?′ you ask. I do not know how, but I do know where-in my fellow man.”

— Elie Wiesel

176. “Beggars inspired me with mingled feelings of love and fear. I knew that I ought to be kind to them, for they might not be what they seemed.”

— Elie Wiesel

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

— Elie Wiesel

178. “The individual is not a cog in a monstrous machine; it is within his power to modify the very laws which imprison him and the very relationship maintained by the Judge with the accused and witnesses. If it is true, as the Baal Shem says, that it is possible for man to hide the light of dawn emanating from the forest simply by shielding his eyes with his hands, still it is no less true that he can rediscover it by merely moving his hands.”

— Elie Wiesel

179. “Could men and women who consider it normal to assist the weak, to heal the sick, to protect small children, and to respect the wisdom of their elders understand what happened there? Would they be able to comprehend how, within that cursed universe, the masters tortured the weak and massacred the children, the sick, and the old?”

— Elie Wiesel

180. “I remember he asked his father, “Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?” And.”

— Elie Wiesel

181. “Auschwitz.” Nobody had ever heard that name.”

— Elie Wiesel

182. “Our sages teach us that two angels attach themselves to a man at birth and never leave him. One walks before and helps him climb mountains, the other follows in the shadows and pushes him toward his fall.”

— Elie Wiesel

183. “Help each other. That is the only way to survive.”

— Elie Wiesel

184. “Suddenly he stopped in front of me and asked for a cigarette. I had a package of Players in my pocket and wanted to give them to him. But he refused to take the whole package, saying quite calmly that obviously he didn’t have time to smoke them all.”

— Elie Wiesel

185. “The revolver was black and nearly new. I was afraid to even touch it, for in it lay all the whole difference between what I was and what I was going to be.”

— Elie Wiesel

186. “I was more afraid of having said too much than too little.”

— Elie Wiesel

187. “Or was it simply to preserve a record of the ordeal I endured as an adolescent, at an age when one’s knowledge of death and evil should be limited to what one discovers in literature?”

— Elie Wiesel

188. “The silence of two people is deeper than the silence of one. Involuntarily I began to talk.”

— Elie Wiesel

189. “If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him.”

— Elie Wiesel

190. “Buy me a drink. We’ll drink to God, who created men in a drunken moment.”

— Elie Wiesel

191. “Melt down the fat. Cut the cosmetics and coloratura. The classic rule of good journalism: honor the verb, sacrifice the adjective.”

— Elie Wiesel

192. “God knows what I would have given to be able to sleep a few moments. But deep inside, I knew that to sleep meant to die. And something in me rebelled against that death.”

— Elie Wiesel

193. “Special units would then disinter the corpses and burn them. Thus, for the first time in history, Jews were not only killed twice but denied burial in a cemetery.”

— Elie Wiesel

194. “God is dead, the God of love, of gentleness and consolation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had, under the watchful gaze of this child, vanished forever into the smoke of the human holocaust demanded by the Race, the most voracious of all idols. And.”

— Elie Wiesel

195. “We were not afraid. And yet, if a bomb had fallen on the blocks, it alone would have claimed hundreds of victims on the spot. But we were no longer afraid of death; at any rate, not of that death. Every bomb that exploded filled us with joy and gave us new confidence in life.”

— Elie Wiesel

196. “The dream conceived by Western man in the eighteenth century, whose dawn he thought he had glimpsed in 1789, and which until August 2, 1914, had become stronger with the advent of the Enlightenment and scientific discoveries – that dream finally vanished for me before those trainloads of small children.”

— Elie Wiesel