Elie Wiesel
Even in darkness it is possible to create light and encourage compassion. That it is possible to feel free inside a prison. That even in exile, friendship exists and can become an anchor. That one instant before dying, man is still immortal.Collection: Men
An indifference to suffering makes humans inhumanCollection: Suffering
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.Collection: Night
The only place where I felt at home, on familiar ground, was the Jewish cemetery. And yet I had never set foot in it before. Children had been forbidden to enter.Collection: Children
It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism.Collection: Easier
A man can laugh while he suffers.Collection: Men
In Jewish tradition the Talmud is said to have been given on Sinai.Collection: Jewish Tradition
I've organised for the last years, since I got the Nobel Prize actually, Anatomy of Hate Conferences all over the world, what is hate. Didn't help but at least they explored it.Collection: Hate
Nobody is stronger, nobody is weaker than someone who came back. There is nothing you can do to such a person because whatever you could do is less than what has already been done to him. We have already paid the price.Collection: Survival
The Tibetan religion has a past. And furthermore it has such an appeal. There again young people today are drawn to Buddhism and to Tibet. It's not only because of the Dalai Lama. It's because of what Tibet represents. There is a vast reservoir of knowledge, of mystical knowledge, which can be found in Tibet.The Chinese shouldn't be afraid of that really. They have other means of survival.Collection: Mean
God means movement, and not explanation.Collection: Mean
The sky is so close to the sea that it is difficult to tell which is reflected in the other, which one needs the other, which one is dominating the other.Collection: Sea
The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.Collection: Biblical
Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.Collection: Life Is
Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?Collection: Writing
I say to myself, if the text was good enough for my father and grandfather, it must be good enough for me. I admit, that is a rather personal way of approaching the text - or a prayer.Collection: Prayer
I became one of [Moses Mendelssohn] defenders. But then I heard the words "Biblical criticism" again. And, of course, afterward, I studied it more closely.Collection: Biblical
Even if people tell me they have historical proof [that it is not historical], that doesn't really bother me.Collection: People
Personally, as a student who loves words, who loves texts, I am concerned with finding something in the text from within.Collection: Students
In my town we studied the five Books of Moses, but rarely the prophets. We studied the Talmud so much that I sometimes knew the prophets because of the prophetic quotations in the Talmud. We almost never studied the prophets themselves.Collection: Book
In Talmudic literature, certainly in the beginning, he was like a human being - except he was a serpent. But he was talking and walking and probably dreaming.Collection: Dream
That [Exodus] occurred, I have no doubt.Collection: Doubt
I personally have no doubt that the Exodus occurred. How it occurred, I don't know.Collection: Doubt
What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is - to use a word scholars love - problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue.Collection: Issues
We've sort of agreed that the account of Adam and Eve is a story.Collection: Stories
If you read Exodus 15 carefully, it describes a storm at sea. This is the old Yahwistic source. In the retelling of the story in the later Priestly source, it is more miraculous: The water stands up on either side like a wall. There are walls of water standing up. As you move back in time, oddly enough, the story becomes more historical.Collection: Wall
The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other's stories.Collection: Life
I thought that culture and education are the shield. An educated person cannot do certain things and, and be educated, you cannot, and there they were, killing children day after day.Collection: Children
I was convinced that hatred among nations and among people perished in Auschwitz. It didn't. The victims died but the haters are still here.Collection: People
Everything is in it: the promise and the hope and the fear and the challenge and the defiance. The test is a double test: Just as God tested Abraham, Abraham tested God: "Let's see if you really want me to go ahead with it and kill my son." Then the angel says, "Do not raise your hand against the boy" [Genesis 22:12]. It was the Angel of God who says this, not God. God was embarrassed. [All laugh]Collection: Angel
You know how many reasons we have to be desperate and despairing, the world is not learning anything. We have seen that.Collection: World
My approach is not a scientific approach. For that, we have greater minds than mine. My approach is: I am in the possession of a text, it has survived so many centuries, and it is my task, my pleasure, to try to decipher it and find all the things that have been said about these few words by generations and generations of commentators. That is what I'm doing. I don't innovate anything. I'm just repeating.Collection: Mind
At Auschwitz, not only man died, but also the idea of man. To live in a world where there is nothing anymore, where the executioner acts as god, as judge-many wanted no part of it. It was its own heart the world incinerated at Auschwitz.Collection: Heart
Refugee today means somebody who has no home. No homeland. No security. No government to protect him or her. And it is of course one feels not only uprooted, one feels useless. One feels always surrounded by hostile forces. Arousing suspicion.Collection: Home
What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other.Collection: Punishment
Holy War is a contradiction of terms.Collection: War
For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.Collection: Memories
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible and they show that there were times, and there probably are times, that it is human to be inhuman.Collection: Thinking
Love makes everything complicated.Collection: Complicated
If there is one person on the planet who still is suffering from loneliness and from pain or despair, and we don't know about it, or we don't want to know about it, then something is wrong with the world.Collection: Pain
Fanaticism in many lands has surfaced as the greatest threat to the world. Indifference to its consequences would be a serious mistake.Collection: Mistake
I think that human beings are capable of the worst things possible.Collection: Thinking
The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.Collection: Certain
Often I say to myself "Really, what are we doing on this planet?" We are passing the message as well as we can, communicating our fears, our hopes ... Day in day out, week after week and year after year, people kill each other.Collection: Years
Which is worse? Killing with hate or killing without hate?Collection: Hate
Man, by definition, is born a stranger: coming from nowhere, he is thrust into an alien world which existed before him-a world which didn't need him. And which will survive him.Collection: Men
My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.Collection: Understood
It takes more than a few generations to change a human nation. Those who are intent to bring (change) will do so.Collection: Generations
[Tibet] never sought any territory. All it wanted is the conquest of the soul, that people should attain a kind of inner sovereignty, inner independence, inner freedom. And inner strength to attain the absolute.Collection: People