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My God was never happiness, but to understand and be understood.

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
Understood
Happiness
Understand
Never

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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I learned to trust the threats of enemies before the promises of friends.
Elie Wiesel
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I would hesitate to give advice to the Dalai Lama and his people because they are suffering. The Dalai Lama suffered from exile and the people in Tibet suffer from oppression.
Elie Wiesel
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I don't see the junk youth. I only meet students, and even those who are not formally at the university, if they come to listen to me, they come to read me, it means they are not junk students.
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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How can one explain the attraction terror holds for some minds — and why for intellectuals? . . .In a totalitarian and terrorist regime, man is no longer a unique being with infinite possibilities and limitless choices but a number, a puppet, with just this difference — numbers and puppets are not susceptible to fear.
Elie Wiesel
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The whole community must be saved [in Tibet].
Elie Wiesel
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I don't know the real answer, my answer to anything which is essentially human relations is education. Whatever the answer is, education must be its measured component and if you try to educate with generosity not with triumphalism I think sometimes it works, especially young people, that's why I teach, I've been teaching all my life.
Elie Wiesel
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No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Elie Wiesel
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We're alone, but we are capable of communicating to one another both our loneliness and our desire to break through it. You say, 'I'm alone.' Someone answers, 'I'm alone too.' There's a shift in the scale of power. A bridge is thrown between the two abysses.
Elie Wiesel
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Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.
Elie Wiesel
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We know, for instance, of The Book of the Wars of the Lord. It is mentioned in the text [Numbers 21:14]. There was a book: Where is it? One day you will dig and you will maybe find it. [Laughter]
Elie Wiesel
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There are real people behind the [Bible] stories.
Elie Wiesel
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When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.
Elie Wiesel
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It's not only America. Terrorism now is a threat to the whole world.
Elie Wiesel
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Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Elie Wiesel
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For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
Elie Wiesel
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The Holocaust is not a cheap soap opera. The Holocaust is not a romantic novel. It is something else.
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Elie Wiesel
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A Jew who converted, who simulated, was, at least in some periods, safe. Hitler in the beginning did not want to kill all the Jews but he wanted us to have a Germany free of Jews. If America had allowed Jews to come in, the British had accepted Jews from Palestine, they were safe.
Elie Wiesel