When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity.

When a person doesn't have gratitude, something is missing in his or her humanity. A person can almost be defined by his or her attitude toward gratitude.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another.

Peace is our gift to each other.

Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.

Some stories are true that never happened.

I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.

Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.

I was very, very religious. And of course I wrote about it in 'Night.' I questioned God's silence. So I questioned. I don't have an answer for that. Does it mean that I stopped having faith? No. I have faith, but I question it.

After all, God is God because he remembers.

Human beings should be held accountable. Leave God alone. He has enough problems.

Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

In any society, fanatics who hate don't hate only me - they hate you, too. They hate everybody.

My greatest disappointment is that I believe that those of us who went through the war and tried to write about it, about their experience, became messengers. We have given the message, and nothing changed.

For me, every hour is grace.

There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don't see them.

We have to go into the despair and go beyond it, by working and doing for somebody else, by using it for something else.

Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.

I write to understand as much as to be understood.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

When language fails, violence becomes a language; I never had that feeling.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

It's clear to me that one can't be Jewish without Israel. Religious or non-religious, Zionist or non-Zionist, Ashkenazi or Sephardic - all these will not exist without Israel.

In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.

Language failed me very often, but then, the substitute for me was silence, but not violence.

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

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

In my tradition, one must wait until one has learned a lot of Bible and Talmud and the Prophets to handle mysticism. This isn't instant coffee. There is no instant mysticism.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

I don't know much about politics, and I don't want to know. That's why I rarely involve myself in politics.

What does mysticism really mean? It means the way to attain knowledge. It's close to philosophy, except in philosophy you go horizontally while in mysticism you go vertically.

Sometimes I am asked if I know 'the response to Auschwitz; I answer that not only do I not know it, but that I don't even know if a tragedy of this magnitude has a response.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share.

Moses was the greatest legislator and the commander in chief of perhaps the first liberation army.

If I were immersed in constant melancholy, I would not be who I am.

Man, as long as he lives, is immortal. One minute before his death he shall be immortal. But one minute later, God wins.

If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

When my father was born, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. When I was born, it was Lithuania. When I left, it was Hungary. It is difficult to say where I come from.

That is my major preoccupation, memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

I'll tell you what: I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it.

I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.

I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.