It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.
— Elie Wiesel
Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.
The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories. It begins, 'In the beginning God created Heaven.' If I had written these words, I wouldn't have written anything else; it's just enough.
I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.
When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.
I don't like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.
In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.
I love teaching.
It used to be said that when the Baal Shem Tov came into a town, his impact was so strong, he didn't have to speak. His disciples had to dance or to sing or to preach to have the same effect. I think a real messenger, myself or anyone, by the very fact that he is there as a person, as a symbol, could have the same impact.
No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.
Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.
After all, God is God because he remembers.
I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life.
Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.
Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.
For me, every hour is grace.
I would like to see real peace and a state of Israel living peacefully alongside a state of Palestine.
Religion is a very personal thing for me. Religion has its good moments and its poor moments.
I do not belong to this world. I continue to write everything in longhand. If I have to see something on the Internet, I ask my secretary or students. I am lucky, because I have people who do it for me.
If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.
Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.
Historically, I come from Jewish history. I had the classic upbringing in the Yeshiva, learning, learning, and more learning.
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone - and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.
My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.
I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.
When did I learn the Bible? When I was four or five years old. It's still the pull of my childhood, a fascination with the vanished world, and I can find everything except that world.
The Bible is not only laws, it's also stories.
I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.
I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.
When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.
You would be amazed at the number of doors a Nobel Prize opens.
One always goes back to one's childhood in the beginning, and I come from a very religious family and surrounding. Very religious.
If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.
I never felt any attraction towards violence. I never tried to express myself through violence. Violence is a language.
I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.
When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.
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.
I never teach the same course twice.
I wanted to write a commentary on the Bible, to write about the Talmud, about celebration, about the great eternal subjects: love and happiness.
It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
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.
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
I remember, May 1944: I was 15-and-a-half, and I was thrown into a haunted universe where the story of the human adventure seemed to swing irrevocably between horror and malediction.
When I was young I lost everything.
In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
