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I want to go back to the child I used to be, and to read with the same naiveté [the Pentateuch]. I want to leave science aside and go back to the pure perception offered to me in the text that is waiting there for me year after year.

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
Children
Leave
Years
Child
Waiting
Naivet
Year
Text
Read
Offered
Science
Aside
Used
Perception
Back
Pure

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

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Perhaps some day someone will explain how, on the level of man, Auschwitz was possible but on the level of God, it will forever remain the most disturbing of mysteries.
Elie Wiesel
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Tibet, why is it occupied? For political reasons maybe they have a reason. I don't know. But religiously, why? The fact that the religious community is being oppressed and persecuted is something that every single person in the world who has any religious faith and religious feeling for - for people who have faith should speak up.
Elie Wiesel
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Young people want to learn, they are thirsty for knowledge, they want to understand and remember. The main thing is to teach them where not to go. Oppression, not to go dictatorship, not to go racism and prejudice, absolutely not to go. This is a moral plan [for society].
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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The story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac are nowhere in any other tradition.
Elie Wiesel
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When I began teaching you hardly could find a university in America or a college where they would teach either Jewish studies or Holocaust studies.
Elie Wiesel
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I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.
Elie Wiesel
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Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.
Elie Wiesel
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If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end?
Elie Wiesel
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A disciple came to the celebrated Master of the Good Name with a question. “Rabbi, how are we to distinguish between a true master and a fake?” And the master of the good name said, “When you meet a person who poses as a master, ask him a question: whether he knows how to purify your thoughts. If he says that he knows, then he is a fake.
Elie Wiesel
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Holy War is a contradiction of terms.
Elie Wiesel
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But where was I to start? The world is so vast, I shall start with the country I knew best, my own. But my country is so very large. I had better start with my town. But my town, too, is large. I had best start with my street. No, my home. No, my family. Never mind, I shall start with myself.
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.
Elie Wiesel
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There is no word in Hebrew for religion, by the way.
Elie Wiesel
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Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world.
Elie Wiesel
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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.
Elie Wiesel
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Life is really fascinated only by death. It vibrates only when it comes in contact with death.
Elie Wiesel
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I write to understand as much as to be understood.
Elie Wiesel
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They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)
Elie Wiesel
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Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile.
Elie Wiesel