Quotes from Elie Wiesel

Love that makes everything complicated. While hate simplifies everything. Hatred puts accents on things and beings, and on what separates them. Love erases accents.

Even if I wrote on nothing else, it would never be enough, even if all the survivors did nothing but write about their experiences, it would still not be enough. *Response when asked how much longer is he going to write about the Holocaust.

What is the difference between Jew and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: were You here before?

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.

The torturer scores a victory over his victim when the latter, in the grip of doubt, begins to torture himself.

Oh God, Master of the Universe, in your infinite compassion, have mercy on us …

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

Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.

I remember a young Hungarian Jew, his shoulders stooped like an old man's, who confessed to some infraction so as to be beaten in his uncle's stead. I am young, he said, and stronger than he. He was young but no less weak. He did not survive the beating

I didn't know that this was the moment in time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.

One German officer lived in the house opposite ours. He had a room with the Kahn family. They said he was a charming man - calm, likable, polite, and sympathetic. Three days after he moved in he brought Madame Kahn a box of chocolates. The optimists rejoiced.

It was a destructive novel of acquired ideas. To finally wake up in a state of creative anguish, to lose oneself in order to find oneself again, to sleep in the arms of a beautiful student whose name one didn't know, to fall back to sleep over a love poem-that was called existence. The harmonics of artistic creation, of fertile sensibility, of anticipated events-history in movement-that was called a privilege.