"I don't think I should accept other people's suffering because I suffered. Just the opposite, because I suffered I don't want others to suffer."
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Quote collection
Elie Wiesel quotes (page 11 of 27)
533 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Pain is essential. Often I cannot avoid it.Therefore all one can do is redeem it; and the only way to redeem it is through literature, art, poetry, music."
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"I belong to a tradition that believes that the death of a single child is a blemish on creation."
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"[Memory] is a passion no less powerful or pervasive than love. It is [the ability] to live in more than one world, to prevent the past from fading, and to call upon the future to illuminate it."
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"Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them. These characters want to get out, to breathe fresh air and partake of the wine of friendship; were they to remain locked in, they would forcibly break down the walls. It is they who force the writer to tell their stories."
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"In my little town, Sighet, which is in Romania, Hungary-Romania, but a real shtetl, a little [Jewish] village - and we began with the Chumash [Pentateuch], probably at age four."
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"If enough people are sensitive to the tragedy of Tibet, I think it will produce a change politically as well. But furthermore, it's important for the people in Tibet. Now communication is such [that] people know what is happening. Even Tibetan people would know that the Interfaith or the international group of religious people - that everybody who is religious is taking up their cause. It would help them a lot if we give them courage, and that in itself is enough."
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"This day I ceased to plead. I was no longer capable of lamentation. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused."
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"Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky."
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"I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."
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"I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow."
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"God made (human beings) because he loves stories."
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"I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it."
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"The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it."
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"Warmed-over loves and soups are generally not recommended."
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"You cross a border and the policeman or the frontier policeman look at you, What are you doing here? Why are you coming? How long will you stay? Well, if I had nearly enough years, I would write a novel about being a refugee."
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"Worse still is that mankind - the non-Jewish world - learned nothing from the Holocaust: The event which had no precedent in history, which should be equal to the Revelation at Sinai in significance."
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"What is man? Ally of God or simply his toy? His triumph or his fall?"
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"It's easier to be conformist naturally; it's easier except for those who don't like conformism."
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"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."
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