624 Quotes by Elie Wiesel

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I’ve been closer to him for that reason.

Bread, soup – these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.

I stood petrified. What had happened to me? My father had just been struck, in front of me, and I had not even blinked. I had watched and kept silent. Only yesterday, I would have dug my nails into this criminal’s flesh. Had I changed that much? So fast? Remorse began to gnaw at me. All I could think was: I shall never forgive them for this. My father must have guessed my thoughts, because he whispered in my ear: “It doesn’t hurt.” His cheek still bore the red mark of the hand.

How much longer would our lives be lived from one “last night” to the next?

The gates of the camp opened. It seemed as though an even darker night was waiting for us on the other side. The.

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.

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

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.

In the beginning there was faith – which is childish; trust – which is vain; and illusion – which is dangerous. We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekhinah’s flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God’s image. That was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals.