Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Elie Wiesel

Image
I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.
Elie Wiesel
Image
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I had to be honest with myself and that I felt hatred then, but as children say I hate you, it's not really hate, you know, it's anger.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I have tried to keep memory alive... I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
Elie Wiesel
Image
That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.
Elie Wiesel
Image
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
Image
Oh, it is not death that frightens me, but the impossibility of imparting some meaning to my past.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.
Elie Wiesel
Image
He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Sometimes I think I prefer the storyteller in [Roman Vishniac] to the photographer. But aren't they one and the same?
Elie Wiesel
Image
I was there when God was put on trial....At the end of the trial, they used the word chayav, rather than 'guilty'. It means 'He owes us something'. Then we went to pray.
Elie Wiesel
Image
God made (human beings) because he loves stories.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I was 15, not 14, when I was inside there [Auschwitz], 15, and for me both were actually a surprise.
Elie Wiesel
Image
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
Elie Wiesel
Image
I'm not a military man. I wish I were, then maybe I could give some advice.
Elie Wiesel
Image
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
Image
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.
Elie Wiesel