Philosophy Quote by Elie Wiesel — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forget not their son who calls upon them now.”

“If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him.”

“I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”

“War is like night, she said. It covers everything.”

“To be alone is to be different, to be different is to be alone.”

“The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.”

“If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.”

“Lend me your ears and you can borrow my mind”

“The wise man who has become accustomed to necessities knows better how to share with others than how to take from them, so great a treasure of self-sufficiency has he found.”

“He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.”