Elie Wiesel Quotes

God, if there is a God, take my soul, if I have a soul.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

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.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed....Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

Christ's own 'God-forsaken-ness' on the cross showed me where God is present where God had been present in those nights of deaths in the fire storms in Hamburg and where God would be present in my future whatever may come.

It's incongruous that the older we get, the more likely we are to turn in the direction of religion. Less vivid and intense ourselves, closer to the grave, we begin to conceive of ourselves as immortal.

God is not dead-He is merely unemployed.

To commit suicide is easy. To live without a god is more difficult. The drunkenness of triumph is greater than the drunkenness of sacrifice.

When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.

"The Holy Ghost," Luther instructs us, "is not a skeptic." Not everyone can be, and that is really too bad.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

For the life of the believer, one thing is beautifully and abundantly true: God's chief concern in your suffering is to be with you and be himself for you.

The point of the Book of Job is not suffering: where is God When It hurts? The prologue (chapters 1-2) dealt with that issue. The point of the Book of Job is faith: Where is Job when it hurts?

Theism, as a way of conceiving God, has become demonstrably inadequate, and the God of theism not only is dying but is probably not revivable. If the religion of the future depends on keeping alive the definitions of theism, then the human phenomenon that we call religion will have come to an end. If Christianity depends on a theistic definition of God, then we must face the fact that we are watching this noble religious system enter the rigor mortis of its own death throes.

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

To be without God is to be a snake / who wants to swallow an elephant.

Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews. When their bodies had finished scouring for gaps in the door, their souls rose up. When their fingernails had scratched at the wood and in some cases were nailed into it by the sheer force of desperation, their spirits came toward me, into my arms, and we climbed out of those shower facilities, onto the roof and up, into eternity's certain breadth. They just kept feeding me. Minute after minute. Shower after shower.

I don't feel like I have a lot to offer in terms of an authoritative voice on a lot of political issue. I don't know how to fix the economy, or how to increase the number of jobs. That is not where I spent my life and thought and meditation. I guess I would like to think that the topics that I am discussing - the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins and the defeat of death - goes up river to all problem.

To have your niece die in your arms is the greatest gift from god.

If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.

There are evils worse than death.

It was like I had a curse on me. I couldn't believe how much God was piling on. There was so much death around me.