624 Quotes by Elie Wiesel

The opposite of life is not death, it's indifference

...why should God be allied with death? Why should He want to kill a man who succeeded in seeing him? Now, everything became clear. God was ashamed. God likes to sleep with twelve-year-old girls. And He doesn't want us to know. Whoever sees it or guesses it must die so as not to divulge the secret. Death is only the guard who protects God, the doorkeeper of the immense brothel that we call the universe.

I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It’s close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.

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.

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.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Why had they arrested me?'Because of a word, perhaps, or a silent grimace,' Razziel Paritus suggested, stroking his beard. 'Or for something your parents were supposed to have done or said. In this country denouncing people is a social duty, a moral imperative, a kind of state religion. It's also possible they arrested you for no reason at all. That your only crime is your innocence.

Musíme se vzbouřit proti bohům a říkat: "Chcete mi odepřít štěstí? Tak dobře, ukousnu si ho pořádné sousto!" To je tváří v tvář utrpení jediná platná odpověď.