Elie Wiesel Quotes

God: personified incomprehensibility.

I wouldn't even like to begin to define God - I have absolutely no idea. But what I feel, and what touches me, is a great spiritual power, which I don't even want to name. If I had to, I would say God, because I don't know any other.

How can the unknown merit reverence? In other words how can you revere that of which you are ignorant? At the same time, it would be ridiculous to propose that what we know merits reverence. What we know merits any one of a number of things, but it stands to reason reverence isn't one of them. In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

In the end, we know God as unknown.

Mysteries are not necessarily miracles.

You don't need an explanation for everything, Recognize that there are such things as miracles - events for which there are no ready explanations. Later knowledge may explain those events quite easily.

Faith is not a rational thing, and yet to understand the universe, rationality alone will not give it to us. Our understanding of the universe must transcend the rational.

It is easy to understand God as long as you don't try to explain him.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.

When I'm asked to define God, I'm almost wordless.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

Life has its dimensions in the mysterious.

I think there's been a big problem between religion, or organized religion, and spirituality.

I believe the divine is part of the world, not in a pantheistic way but by way of the movement of the Spirit.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Religion may be defined thus: a belief in, and homage rendered to, existences unseen and causes unknown.

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God

The proud intellectual seeks knowledge about God, but he never knows God, because he cannot accept the mysteries that he is unable to fully comprehend.

Discipleship is not limited to what you can comprehend – it must transcend all comprehension. Plunge into the deep waters beyond your own comprehension, and I will help you to comprehend even as I do. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. My comprehension transcends yours.

Some prayers are followed by silence because they are wrong, others because they are bigger than we can understand.

A God that can be understood is no God. Who can explain the Infinite in words?

What is god, what is not god, what is between man and god, who shall say?

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.