624 Quotes by Elie Wiesel

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

In any case, he had bungled his life. Bad husband, bad father, bad lover: failure all along the line . . . All the springs were broken. No more light anywhere . . . Everything he had tried to build had fallen apart. The little good he had done had resulted in fiasco. Whose fault could it be other than his own? . . . And anyone will tell you that if God Himself cannot undo what happened, still less can man.

Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?

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.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

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.

But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.

I have to wonder about people who compare Israelis to Nazis.