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Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

Elie Wiesel

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Elie Wiesel
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 30
Died: 2016
Died: July 2
Autobiographer
Humanist
Journalist
Judaic Scholar
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Activist
Professor
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Sighetu Marmaţiei
Eliezer Wiesel
A-7713
Élie Wiesel
Obligation
Overcoming
Meaning
Literature
Give
Giving
Passive
Life
Indifferent
Overcome

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Take sides. Neutrality always serves the oppressor and never the oppressed.
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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
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'Indifference to evil is equal to evil' because it strengthens people.
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What is man? Hope turned to dust. No. What is man? Dust turned to hope.
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When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
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In those dark times, one rose to the very heights of humanity by simply remaining human.
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It was the beginning of the war. I was twelve years old, my parents were alive, and God still dwelt in our town.
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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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Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.
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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.
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If you make a determination that [story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac] is not historical, do you throw it away? I don't think we can say whether it's precisely, scientifically historical.
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If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?
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Nevertheless, we are led to believe that true words can communicate more than truth, they communicate what life is all about, that it's threatened, when it's threatened, when it's in danger, then it becomes a curse or a blessing.
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I try to see their moral relevance [in the Bible] and, of course, to admire the literary beauty of the text. Prophetic poetry: No one has written the way Isaiah does.
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From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.
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You're at the bottom of the mountain. May you climb up without suffering.
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[ Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac] was the greatest commentator [of the Bible] we ever had.
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The philosophers are wrong: it is not words that kill, it is silence.
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I have an open mind - - I read, I study, I study your work and the work of other people with less talent. But that is not what I do in my writing and teaching. Still the love for the text we have in common.
Elie Wiesel
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We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.
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