Quotes from Elie Wiesel

All this under a magnificent blue sky.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Judge God. He created the universe and made justice stem from injustices. He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies…

When you die and go to heaven our maker is not going to ask, 'why didn't you discover the cure for such and such? why didn't you become the Messiah?' The only question we will be asked in that precious moment is 'why didn't you become you?' Elie Wiesel

Love is worth as much as prayer. Sometimes more.