Elie Wiesel Quotes

O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.

The whole truth... sings only - and all lovers are the song.

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.

German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry.... Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty." It tries to be truthful.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

Truth shines the brighter, clad in verse.

All high truth is poetry. Take the results of science: they glow with beauty, cold and hard as are the methods of reaching them.

You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play.

The poets are almost always wrong about the facts... That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth...

One ought, everyday, to hear a song, read a fine poem, and, if possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

There is no passion that is not finely expressed in those parts of the inspired writings which are proper for divine songs and anthems.

Poetry is fired by love.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Eloquence the soul, song charms the senses.

I asked her, "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" She looked at her watch and said, "I'm optimistic." "Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each others as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon." "Why do beautiful songs make you sad?" "Because they aren't true." "Never?" "Nothing is beautiful and true." She smiled, but in a way that wasn't just happy, and said, "You sound just like Dad.