Elie Wiesel Quotes

Words are a completely different form of expression. The word P-E-N-I-S is an entirely different form of communication than a photograph of the same thing. H

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

I often pick up papers and books which have all kinds of pictures and marks in them, but I cannot understand them as a white person does. They have a way of communicating by the use of written symbols and figures; but before they could do that, they had to have an understanding among themselves. You are learning that, and I was very much pleased to hear you are reading.

Everyone thinks that hieroglyphics are really old but if you think about how the world's going now, I think they are just emojis.

The photograph [of Che Guevara], for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event... it was an argument.

Everything has changed, but the process of telling a story has not changed. It's like cavemen sitting around the fire; somebody's going to tell the story. Somebody is drawing on the wall. You're communicating. You're trying to learn and teach at the same time. You're your own student and you're your own teacher, but the process is of the communicating.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

The Germans, in the age of Tacitus, were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge or reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of the mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

The sentence is the greatest human invention of civilization.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

If we had no language we'd have nothing.

Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk - a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.

I think story-telling is innate in human beings, it's something that we've done since we scrawled across cave walls.

Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet.

The importance of writing in the breakdown of the bicameral voices is tremendously important. What had to be spoken is now silent and carved upon a stone to be taken in visually.

but do i need to say anything?" sophie asked. "do i need to learn any words?" "like what?" saint-germain said. "well, when you lit up the eiffel tower, you said something that sounded like eggness" "ignis" the count said. "latin for fire. no, you don't need to say anything." "then why did you do it, then?" sophie asked. saint-germain grinned. "i just thought it sounded cool.

[Language is] really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. I'm sitting here making grunting sounds and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it.

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish.

In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily reading aloud.