Elie Wiesel Quotes

I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.

I just find that there's something about looking back on interviews, whether for purposes of remembering what I said about something or if it's for posterity when I'm 75.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.

Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again.

The Warrior remembers the past.

Remembrance is a form of meeting.

I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in travelling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences. The footsteps are obliterated now; the face of the country may be changed; but the pillar is still there, to remind me how all things were when it was reared.

From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.

The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs.

Having people remember something that you did 25 years ago doesn't suck.

I started out as Keith Mitchell. I had done probably about ten years of television work under that name. Then my grandfather passed away in 1984. I wanted to honor him and his name.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

I wanted to write what I remembered to be true.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

Never, ever forget history.

I started to write things down, as a very young child, wanting to find a way to remember - to keep close, somehow - moments that made an impression on me.