Elie Wiesel Quotes

I don't feel I have an alter ego.

Nothing is stranger to man than his own image.

Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have -- that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."

If you become aware of a public self, you're in danger of becoming a very artificial person.

Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.

I don't know how to not become every person I walk by.

I didn't want to lose my sense of myself in my profession.

People ask me to describe myself, but it's a very personal thing. You don't feel comfortable.

Identity in the form of continuity of personality is an extremely important characteristic of the individual.

It's so much easier to know who you are when there aren't a thousand people telling you who they think you are.

I didn't want to have to deal with having any moniker or separation between the self that I see and know myself as.

Our subjectivity is so completely our own.

Human beings, from their own point of view, are very different than what people see.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that's always existed.

I can't turn off the way I think, and that's essentially who I am, who anybody is.

I don't want everybody to just see the baseball side of me.

Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me.

I am a person. I am not a soap opera.

You see a person when you look in the mirror that no one sees but you. Other people see a person when they look at you, but you're not that person, either.

Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos.

I identify with my womanhood before anything else because that's what I deal with when I am alone.

Nobody else can tell you what you are.

I don't even know who I am. All I know is that I am the sibling, daughter, sister, the friend of somebody, and I need to know who I am outside of that.

I think, personally, it's our flaws that define us to us - or maybe it's just me.