text:
Carlito's Way

Carlito's Way is a 1993 film about a Puerto Rican ex-con, just released from prison, who pledges to stay away from drugs and violence despite the pressure around him and lead on to a better life outside of NYC.
 * Directed by Brian De Palma. Screenplay by David Koepp based on novels by Edwin Torres.

In his world, you got to shoot your way out. (taglines)

Carlito Brigante

 * You think you're big time? You're gonna fuckin' DIE big time!
 * Somebody’s pullin’ me close to the ground. I can sense, but I can’t see. I ain’t panicked, I been here before. Same as when I got popped on 104th Street. Don’t take me to no hospital, please. Fuckin’ emergency rooms don’t save nobody. Sons of bitches always pop you at midnight when all they got is a Chinese intern with a dull spoon. Look at these suckers scramblin' around. What for? My Puerto Rican ass ain't supposed to have made it this far. Most of my crew got washed a long time ago. Don't worry. My heart, it don't ever quit. I ain't ready to check out. Seems like I just got out of the joint. Stood up in front of that judge, and told him what was who.
 * Your Honor with all due respect, past and present, and without further to-do. Let me ensure this court that I am through walkin’ on the wild side. That’s all I’ve been tryin’ to tell you. I have been sick with the social ills known in the ghetto. But my time in the sterling correction facilities of Green Haven and Sing Sing have not been in vain. I’ve been cured! Born again, like the Watergaters. I know you heard this rap before. Your Honor, I mean it. This is the truth. I changed. I changed, and it didn’t take no thirty years like Your Honor thought, but only five. That’s right, sir, five years. And look at me. Completely rehabilitated, reinvigorated, reassimilated and finally going to be relocated, and I want to thank a lot of people for that. I look over there and I see that man there, Mr Norwalk. I want to thank you, sir, for making the tapes in an illegal fashion. I would like to thank the Court Of Appeals, for reversing you, Your Honour. And I want to thank Almighty God without whom no case gets tossed.
 * No favor. I owe you. Favor gonna kill you faster than a bullet.
 * Here’s me back on the street. Third Sunday in August. Old Timer’s Day in the barrio. Nothin’ left. Like them old cowboy movies, only instead of tumbleweed and cow dung we got stripped car wrecks and dog shit.
 * I’M RELOADED! Come on in here, motherfuckers! Come on, I’m waitin’ for ya! You ain’t comin’ in? I’m comin’ out! You’re up against it now, motherfuckers! I’m gonna blow your fuckin’ brains out! You think you’re big time? You’re gonna fuckin’ die big time! You ready? Here comes the pain!
 * Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, look at you. You said they were friends, Guajiro. But there ain’t no friends in this shit business.
 * Times have changed. What happened to the miniskirts? Where’s all that marijuana? Now everything is platforms, cocaine, and dances I don’t dance. What a man gotta come to when he loses five years.
 * This guy, this counsellor in Lewisburg, Mr Seawald, once said to me: “Charlie, you run out of steam. You can’t sprint all the way. You gotta stop sometime. You can’t buck it forever. It catches up to you. It gets you. You don’t get reformed, you just run out of wind.”
 * Okay, Benny Blanco from the Bronx. The chick Steffie belongs to the club. Now if I ever, I mean if I ever, see you here again you die, just like that.
 * Dumb move, man. Dumb move. But it’s like them old reflexes comin’ back. I know what’s supposed to happen now. Benny’s gotta go down. And if I don’t do it, they’re gonna say: “Carlito, he’s flaky, man. Slacked-out. A used-to-be bad guy. Joint got to Carlito.” The street is watchin’. She is watchin’ all the time.
 * Guys went down, yeah, but it ain’t like, you know, you just decide one day and that’s it. No. You just do what you gotta do to survive. Somehow, you know, you just end up where you are.
 * Dave is my friend, Gail. I owe him. That’s who I am, That’s what I am, right or wrong. I can’t change that!
 * You ain’t a lawyer no more, Dave. You’re a gangster now. You’re on the other side. Whole new ball game. You can’t learn about it at school, and you can’t have a late start.
 * When you can’t see the angles no more, you’re in trouble, baby. You’re in trouble.
 * The dream don't come no closer by itself. We gotta run after it now.
 * [last words of the movie] Sorry, boys, all the stitches in the world can’t sew me together again... Lay down. Lay down. Gonna stretch me out in Fernandez Funeral Home on 109th street... Always knew I’d make a stop there, but a lot later than a whole gang of people thought. Last of the Mo-Rican’s. Well, maybe not the last. Gail’s gonna be a good mom. New, improved Carlito Brigante. Hope she uses the money to get out. No room in this city for big hearts like hers... Sorry, baby, I tried the best I could. Honest. Can’t come with me on this trip, though... Gettin’ the shakes now. Last call for drinks. Bar’s closin’ down. Sun’s out. Where we goin’ for breakfast? Don’t wanna go far... Rough night. Tired, baby... Tired...

David Kleinfeld

 * Hey, look, relax. You’re not dealing so he can’t have anything on you. That’s not possible. This is the way this guy is. He’s on a goddamn fishing exhibition.
 * Fuck you and your self-righteous code of the goddamned street. Did it pull you out of a thirty-year stint in five years? Did it? No, I did. Did it get you acquitted four fucking times? No, it didn't, I did. So fuck you, fuck the streets, your whole goddamn world is this big, and there's only one rule - you save your own ass.

Gail

 * I mean, I don’t judge you. You know, Charlie. And what do you do that’s so wonderful? You ever kill anybody, Charlie?
 * Yeah, I had a dream, Charlie, but now I’m awake. And I hate my dream.
 * Everything you learned in the neighbourhood, every instinct you’ve got won’t do anything but get you killed!
 * I know how this dream ends, Charlie. It isn’t in paradise. It ends with me carrying you into Sutton Emergency Room at three o’clock in the morning. And standing there, crying like an idiot... while your shoes fill with blood and you die.

Benny Blanco

 * My name is Benny Blanco from the Bronx.
 * You’re over, man. You’re fuckin’ in the history books. That’s where you are, man. So you might as well fuckin’ kill me now, ‘cause if I ever see you again, swear to god, I’m gonna fucking kill you.
 * Hey, remember me? Benny Blanco From The Bronx?

Other

 * Pachanga: Carlito, man, Death Valley out here, man. You know me, I take to the street with any of these Motherfuckers, man. But these new kids nowadays, man, they got no respect for human life. They shotgun you just to see you fly up in the air. You’re better off in jail.
 * Lalin: What do you mean? You didn’t hear? I took a few in the back. When the streets are mad at you she don’t put you in a box, she puts you in one of these things.
 * Saso: What has happened to you? What are you acting like this for? It doesn’t make sense that you should hate this guy. Because this guy is you, twenty years ago.

Dialogue

 * Carlito: So look at you. You really made something of your life.
 * Kleinfeld: You put me in business. All my first clients came through you.
 * Carlito: As I say, you know, top drawer. You’re Top Drawer, Davey.

 * Stef: Carlito, I see you were talkin’ to Benny Blanco before.
 * Carlito: Yeah. Benny Blanco from the Bronx.
 * Stef: They say he’s coming up in the world.
 * Carlito: Really?
 * Stef: Hmm, mmm.
 * Carlito: He’s got a big future if he can live past next week.

 * Guajiro: C'mon, Quisqueya, huh bro? What news?
 * Quisqueya: Your boss is dead and SO ARE YOU!

 * Stef: Hey, Carlito, where you been hiding this man, huh? This is one sexy man. He’s an animal. You know that?
 * Carlito: Faster than a speeding bullet, huh.

 * Benny Blanco: Mr Brigante, this is the second time you turned me down for a drink. What, you don’t like my champagne?
 * Carlito: It could be.
 * Benny Blanco: Maybe, there’s a mis-fucking-understanding. Maybe you don’t remember me, my name...
 * Carlito: Maybe I don’t give a shit. Maybe I don’t remember the last time I blew my nose either. Who the fuck are you, that I should remember you, huh? What, you think you’re like me? You ain’t like me, motherfucker. You’re a punk.  I’ve been with made people, connected people. Who you been with? Chain-snatchin’, jive-ass, maricon motherfuckers. Why don’t you get lost? Go ahead, snatch a purse. Take a fuckin’ walk.

 * Carlito: Let me deal with Pachanga. He’s my brother.
 * Saso: He’s your brother? That son of a bitch would kill his mother for money.
 * Carlito: Most people will.

 * Carlito: I’ve been to Norwalk’s office. I heard the tape.
 * Kleinfeld: That pig.
 * Carlito: Never give up your friends, Dave, no matter what.

Taglines

 * In his world, you got to shoot your way out.
 * He wanted out. He'd do anything to get there.

Cast

 * Al Pacino — Carlito Brigante
 * Sean Penn — David Kleinfeld
 * Penelope Ann Miller — Gail
 * John Leguizamo - Benny Blanco
 * Ingrid Rogers - Steffie
 * Luis Guzman - Pachanga
 * James Rebhorn - Norwalk
 * Joseph Siravo - Vinnie Taglialucci
 * Viggo Mortensen - Lalin
 * Richard Foronjy - Pete Amadesso
 * Jorge Porcel - Saso
 * Frank Minucci - Tony Taglialucci
 * Adrian Pasdar - Frankie
 * John Ortiz (I) - Guajiro
 * Angel Salazar - Walberto
 * Al Israel - Rolando
 * Rick Aviles - Quisqueya
 * Jamie Sanchez - Rudy
 * Emonte Salvato - Battaglia
 * Paul Mazaursky - Judge Feinstein

title: Carlito's Way


text:
Talk:Epitaphs

"What you are we were"
"What you are we were and what we are you will become" Is it just me, or does that seem strikingly familiar to something in a graveyard in one of Mario Puzo's books? --LuciferBlack 19:27, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Werner Heisenberg
I've seen Heisenberg's tombstone and it just says his name, the word "Physiker" (German for physicist) and dates of birth and death. The rest of his families names are on the stone too. But the epitaph that's quoted here is just a joke. There is a picture of the tombstone on Wikipedia if someone wants to confirm this.

Edgar Allen Poe
[] seems to contradict the epitaph listed for Poe. I don't how reliable that source is, though.--128.143.167.76 20:16, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

So far as I can see, Poe's epitaph is simply: 'Quoth the Raven, Nevermore' [note the omission of 'fly']. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.18.184.212 (talk • contribs) 23:33, 6 March 2007 (UTC)

 * Agreed. Have edited 87.194.252.72 23:51, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Spike milligan
As I understand it, the reason that his epitaph is in Irish/gaelic is that he's buried in a churchyard, and so, as the local church authorities can control what is written on gravestones, his family xcouldn't just have whatever they wanted put on it. The local authorities objected to "I told you I was ill" as too flippant for a gravestone, so the final copromise was to put the same words up in gaelic.

[]

I just couldn't think of a good way to word it 81.102.41.34 21:00, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

From "Gene Ragnon"
(deleted)

Correction:

The name in this epitaph is erroneously spelled "Gene Ragnon."

The correct spelling for the name of this U.S. Marine is Rene Gagnon.

(added there by anon, 65.74.255.245)

John Laird McCaffery
According to snopes.com, the Montreal Mirror reported that it was John's ex-wife and mistress that came in together to order the headstone. Should this be noted in the article?

Cleanup
I tagged this article for cleanup for several reasons: In short, this article needs some attention from experienced Wikiquotians in order to develop some guidelines that address the special requirements for this topic without making it too hard for editors to add or modify entries. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 13:53, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Many of the entries don't follow the guidelines at the top.
 * The guidelines don't explicitly describe how one should source the epitaphs. (Sourcing is an essential part of Wikiquote entries.)
 * It is unclear how the epitaphs themselves should be formatted (capitalization, multiple lines, etc.).
 * Formatting multiline epitaphs (necessary for some lengthy ones) presents challenges to following any format guidelines, demonstrated by the wide variations currently shown here.

Lack of sources; arbitrary deletions
As I suggested above, there is very little sourcing for any of these attributed epitaphs, making them hard to verify. On top of all the other problems that these epitaph entries have, it makes it much easier just to delete problem entries than to fix them. (I've just deleted the entry from Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes on this basis, as someone included the entire lyrics of the song "Waterfalls" as her epitaph, and without a source to back this up, I thought it best to delete such a likely copyright violation.)

Please note that editors are encourage to removed unsourced material from Wikimedia project articles, per Wikipedia policy. Like everything else on the smaller Wikiquote project, we haven't paid much attention to this general policy, but in order to tame the unwieldy nature of this epitaph article, I plan to delete any entry that looks suspiciously inaccurate, unlikely, or in any other way causing problems, unless it has a cited reliable source (web, print, or audiovisual) that may be used to verify it. I don't plan to wade through the article to pare it down fully, but anything that gets attention called to it (like new edits) may get axed if it isn't sourced. I'm hoping this will motivate editors to cite their sources when editing. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 03:20, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Winston Churchill
Are these epitaphs supposed to be real grave inscriptions? If so the Winston Churchill example (and I'm sure many others) are not. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.219.25.147 (talk • contribs) 12:24, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Gandhi
How could M. K. Gandhi have a tombstone? He was cremated and his ashes spread over a river. --Marshall19 67.180.56.14 07:50, 2 March 2007 (UTC) Its not so much a Grave stone as it is a memorial, but there is a mahtama gandhi memorial at Raj Ghat on the banks of the river Yamuna (apparantly the place he was cremated)

William Churchill's epitaph
So far as I can see, Churchill's gravestone does not say anything about meeting his maker; it simply states his name and dates, along with those of his wife, Clementine. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.18.184.212 (talk • contribs) 23:28, 6 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Confirmed at Find-a-Grave. Arakunem 20:20, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Shakespeare
I had edited his epitaph on Jan 22 to accurately reflect the Old English spelling he used. Prior it had been listed as we would speak it today. My edit was recently reverted back to the Modernized english. Just wondering which form is preferable, so as not to get in a pointless edit war. I do think that if the Modern English is preferred, that the quotation marks should be removed. Arakunem 20:12, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I would think that it would be good to show both - I would first list the Old English version, as you had it. Then in a sub-bullet, I would show the Modern English version, much as we do for quotes in a foreign language, where we first list it in the foreign language, then list a translation beneath it. ~ UDScott 20:17, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Clean Up
I cleaned up a little of the problems. I hope I helped. Bigroger27509 13:51, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Robert Emmett
I have deleted Robert Emmett. The quoted text, the final paragraph of his speech from the dock at sentencing, is not his epitaph - rather it is his declaration that no man should write his epitaph until his nation takes its rightful place among the nations of the world. In fact, Emmett has no epitaph, as his burial place is unknown. He was hung, beheaded, and buried secretly so as to discourage those who might rally to his grave and cause. Irish Melkite 05:47, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

John Brown
Is there a source for this? I distinctly remember this from the graveyard in King's Quest IV! Double sharp (talk) 14:07, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Apparently it is an old American dentist's epitaph, quoted as far back as 1902 . ~ DanielTom (talk) 16:06, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Cool. Added cite; feel free to clean it up (it's probably not conforming to some standard...) Double sharp (talk) 14:46, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

Unsourced: As many epitaphs are not written by the person who is being honoured, the format shall be as follows:

 * The following authoritive text didn't look right... it was up top before the quotes, but is not sourced and is not on the wikipedia page, so it's been moved here.

2BKleer (talk) 21:38, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

 * As many epitaphs are not written by the person who is being honoured, the format shall be as follows:
 * Honouree (author) - Year of birth - Year of Death
 * Text of Epitaph
 * Citation to a published source
 * More explanation text

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Talk:Epitaphs


text:
Talk:Chief Joseph

If only they, the whiteman, had taken the time to listen and understand
 * Then there wouldn't be a United States, and the world would be a different place.

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Chief Joseph. --Antiquary 17:52, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
 * The Earth and myself are of one mind.

 * We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do. We do not want to learn  that. We may quarrel with men about things on earth, but we never quarrel about the Great Spirit.

 * I knew I had never sold my country, and that I had no land in Lapwai; but I did not want bloodshed. I did not want my people killed. I did not want anybody killed....I said in my heart that, rather than have war, I would give up everything rather than have the blood of white men upon the hands of my people.

 * I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth.

 * Look twice at a two-faced man.

 * Cursed be he that scalps the reputation of the dead.

 * The eye tells what the tongue would hide.

 * Big name often stands on small legs.

 * Finest fur may cover toughest meat.

title: Talk:Chief Joseph


text:
User talk:Zy26

--Zy26 08:20, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)

title: User talk:Zy26


text:
Elie Wiesel

Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel (30 September 1928 – 2 July 2016) was a Romanian-born American Jewish writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He authored 57 books (mostly written in French and English), including Night, a work based on his experience incarcerated in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Quotes

 * Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.
 * The Gates of the Forest (1964)

 * Some writings could sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
 * A statement of 1968, as quoted in "How And Why I Write: An Interview with Elie Wiesel" by Heidi Anne Walker, in Journal of Education, Vol. 162 (1980), p. 57
 * Variants:
 * Some words are deeds.
 * Souls on Fire : Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (1982)
 * Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.
 * As quoted in "Nobelists, Auschwitz, and Survival" by Robert McAfee Brown, in Christianity and Crisis, Vol. 48 (March 7, 1988), p. 58

 * Time does not heal all wounds; there are those that remain painfully open.
 * A Jew Today (1978)

 * If you ask me what I want to achieve, it's to create an awareness, which is already the beginning of teaching.
 * In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 85

 * What I don't like today is, to put it coarsely, the phony Hasidism, the phony mysticism. Many students say, "Teach me mysticism." It's a joke.
 * In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 86

 * Miracles in mysticism don't occupy such an important place. It's metaphor, for the peasants, for the crowds, to impress people. 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. You plunge into it. Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.
 * In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 87

 * I rarely speak about God. To God yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But open discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.
 * In a 1978 interview with John S. Friedman, published in The Paris Review 26 (Spring 1984); and in Elie Wiesel : Conversations (2002) edited by Robert Franciosi, p. 87

 * That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.
 * Comments regarding US President Ronald Reagan's proposed visit to a Bitburg cemetery with then German President Helmut Kohl, on receiving the Congressional Gold Medal from Reagan (January 4, 1985).

 * I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been closer to him for that reason.
 * "Man in the News; Witness to Evil: Eliezer Weisel", by Joseph Berger, The New York Times (15 October 1986)

 * What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander.
 * In an interview with Carol Rittner and Sandra Meyers in Courage To Care - Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, NYU Press, 1986, p. 2. Also quoted by Yad Vashem and Nicholas Kristoff in The Silence of the Bystanders, The New York Times (March 19, 2006).

 * Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.
 * US News & World Report (October 27, 1986)

 * The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies. To be in the window and watch people being sent to concentration camps or being attacked in the street and do nothing, that's being dead.
 * US News & World Report (October 27, 1986)

 * Whenever an angel says "Be not afraid!" you'd better start worrying. A big assignment is on the way.
 * As quoted in Spirituality and Liberation : Overcoming the Great Fallacy (1988) by Robert McAfee Brown, p. 136

 * From time immemorial, people have talked about peace without achieving it. Do we simply lack enough experience? Though we talk peace, we wage war. Sometimes we even wage war in the name of peace. . . . War may be too much a part of history to be eliminated—ever.
 * As quoted in "Is World Peace on the Horizon?", in The Watchtower (April 15, 1991)

 * No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.
 * "Have You Learned The Most Important Lesson Of All?", published in Parade Magazine (May 24, 1992)

 * I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
 * As quoted in the International Herald Tribune (September 15, 1992)

 * An immoral society betrays humanity because it betrays the basis for humanity, which is memory. An immoral society deals with memory as some politicians deal with politics. A moral society is committed to memory: I believe in memory. The Greek word alethia means Truth, Things that cannot be forgotten. I believe in those things that cannot be forgotten and because of that so much in my work deals with memory... What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.
 * "Building a Moral Society", Chamberlin Lecture at Lewis & Clark College (1995)

 * Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the silent screams of terrified mothers, the prayers of anguished old men and women. Listen to the tears of children. Jewish children, a beautiful little girl among them, with golden hair, whose vulnerable tenderness has never left me. Look and listen as they walk towards dark flames so gigantic that the planet itself seemed in danger.
 * From an address given at Auschwitz in occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Holocaust (January 27, 1995)

 * The duty of the survivor is to bear testimony to what happened . . . You have to warn people that these things can happen, that evil can be unleashed. Race hatred, violence, idolatries—they still flourish.
 * As quoted in "Will Hatred Ever End?", in The Watchtower (June 15, 1995)

 * What is abnormal is that I am normal. 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.
 * After being asked "What does it take to be normal again, after having your humanity stripped away by the Nazis?" in an interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

 * 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.
 * Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

 * For me, every hour is grace. And I feel gratitude in my heart each time I can meet someone and look at his or her smile.
 * Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

 * I had anger but never hate. Before the war, I was too busy studying to hate. After the war, I thought, What's the use? To hate would be to reduce myself.
 * Interview in O : The Oprah Magazine (November 2000)

 * In Jewish history there are no coincidences.
 * Interview in the BU Bridge (November 5, 2004)

 * I believe mysticism is a very serious endeavor. One must be equipped for it. One doesn't study calculus before studying arithmetic. 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.
 * As quoted in "10 Questions for Elie Wiesel" by Jeff Chu in TIME (January 22, 2006)

 * The most important question a human being has to face... What is it? The question, Why are we here?
 * "“Why Are We Here?”, in The Watchtower (2006)

 * It's up to you now, and we shall help you — that my past does not become your future.
 * Speech at the UN World Peace Day (21 September 2006) New York, Speech in UN Webcast (00:16:35)

 * When a Jew visits Jerusalem for the first time, it is not the first time; it is a homecoming.
 * As quoted in "Elie Wiesel: Jerusalem is Above Politics" in Arutz Sheva (April 17, 2010)

 * There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win.
 * Attributed in The Little Book of Romanian Wisdom (2011) edited by Diana Doroftei and Matthew Cross

 * The greatest commandment to me in the Bible is not the Ten Commandments. (First of all, it’s too difficult to observe; second, we all pretend to observe.) My commandment is ‘Thou shall not stand idly by.’ Which means, when you witness an injustice: Don’t stand idly by. When you hear of a person or a group being persecuted: Do not stand idly by. When there is something wrong with the community around you or far away: Do not stand idly by. You must intervene. You must interfere. And that is actually the motto of human rights.
 * Commencement ceremony (Class of 2011) at Washington University in St. Louis.

 * Once you label a people "illegal", that is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews. You do not label a people "illegal." They have committed an illegal act. They are immigrants who crossed illegally. They are immigrants who crossed without papers. They are immigrants who crossed without permission. They are living in this country without permission. But they are not an illegal people.
 * Remark to CNN journalist Maria Hinojosa, as quoted in "No human being is illegal and Elie Wiesel" Long Island Wins (July 6, 2016)

Night (1960)

 * Translation by Marion Wiesel (2006)

 * To forget would not only be dangerous but offensive. to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.
 * Preface

 * They called him Moishe the Beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

 * "The yellow star? So what? It's not lethal..." (Poor Father! Of what then did you die?)

 * The barbed wire that encircled us like a wall did not fill us with real fear. In fact, we felt this was not a bad thing: we were entirely among ourselves. A small Jewish republic...

 * People thought this was a good thing. We would no longer have to look at all those hostile faces, endure those hate-filled stares. No more fear. No more anguish. We would live entirely among Jews, among brothers...

 * Most people thought we would remain in the ghetto until the end of the war, until the arrival of the Red Army. Afterward everything would be as before. The ghetto was ruled by neither German nor Jew; it was ruled by delusion.

 * The street resembled fairgrounds deserted in haste. There was a little of everything: suitcases, briefcases, bags, knives, dishes, banknotes, papers, faded portraits. All the things one planned to take along and finally left behind. They had ceased to matter. Open rooms everywhere. Gaping doors and windows looked out into the void. It all belonged to everyone since it no longer belonged to anyone. It was there for the taking. An open tomb.

 * "Faster! Faster! Move, you lazy good-for-nothings!" the Hungarian police were screaming. That was when I began to hate them, and my hatred remains our only link today. They were our first oppressors. They were the first faces of hell and death.

 * No one was praying for the night to pass quickly. The stars were but sparks of the immense conflagration that was consuming us. Were this conflagration to be extinguished one day, nothing would be left in the sky but extinct stars and unseeing eyes.

 * The Hungarian lieutenant went around with a basket and retrieved the last possessions from those who chose not to go on tasting the bitterness of fear. "There are eighty of you in the car," the German officer added. "If anyone goes missing, you will all be shot, like dogs." The two disappeared. The doors clanked shut. We had fallen into the trap, up to our necks. The doors were nailed, the way back irrevocably cut off. The world had become a hermetically sealed cattle car.

 * The beloved objects that we had carried with us from place to place were now left behind in the wagon and, with them, finally, our illusions.

 * An SS came toward us wielding a club. He commanded: "Men to the left! Women to the right!" Eight words spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight simple, short words. Yet that was the moment when I left my mother. There was no time to think, and I already felt my father's hand press against mine: we were alone.

 * "The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria..."

 * "Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shmey raba...May His name be celebrated and sanctified..." whispered my father. For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?

 * Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky. Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes. Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.

 * The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either.

 * The night had passed completely. The morning star shone in the sky. I too had become a different person. The student of Talmud, the child I was, had been consumed by the flames. All that was left was a shape that resembled me. My soul had been invaded - and devoured - by a black flame.

 * "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where hanging here from this gallows..." That night, the soup tasted of corpses.

 * Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. When You were displeased by Noah's generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!

 * Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm. Blessed be God's name? Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled.Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

 * But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes no, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.

 * The bell. It was already time to part, to go to bed. The bell regulated everything. It gave me orders and I executed them blindly. I hated that bell. Whenever I happened to dream of a better world, I imagined a universe without a bell.

 * "Don't be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve." I exploded: "What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?" His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people."

 * We were outside. The icy wind whipped my face. I was constantly biting my lips so that they wouldn't freeze. All around me, what appeared to be a dance of death. My head was reeling. I was walking through a cemetery. Among the stiffened corpses, there were logs of wood. Not a sound of distress, not a plaintive cry, nothing but mass agony and silence. Nobody asked anyone for help. One died because one had to. No point in making trouble.

 * When I woke up, it was daylight. That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet had abandoned him. I went to look for him. Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn't find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength to fight for my own survival, to take care of myself...Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.

 * His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered. I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last!
 * About the death of his father

 * One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.

The Trial of God (1979)

 * All page numbers are from the 1995 Schocken Books paperback edition, translated by Marion Wiesel ISBN 0-8052-1053-9

 * BERISH: I resigned from membership in God—I resigned from God. Let Him look for another innkeeper, let Him find another people, let Him push around another Jew—I’m through with Him! MARIA: Don’t you worry, Master. You say things, but God isn’t angry How could He be? He isn’t even listening.
 * Act I (p. 15)

 * PRIEST: Are you taking their side, daughter? You’ll burn in hell. MARIA: Better in hell with them than in paradise with you.
 * Act I (p. 31)

 * MENDEL: What shall we play? BERISH: Can I choose? MENDEL: Of course; it’s your theater. MARIA: Long live theater...What’s theater? BERISH: When you do something without doing it, when you say something without saying it, while thinking that you did say, and you did do something—anything—that’s theater.
 * Act I (p. 38)

 * BERISH: I distrust miracles. They exist only in books, and books say anything.
 * Act I (p. 40)

 * MENDEL: Once you’re on your knees, you can’t stand up straight again.
 * Act I (p. 48)

 * BERISH: Men and women are being beaten, tortured and killed—how can one not be afraid of Him? True, they are victims of men. But the killers kill in His name. Not all? True, but numbers are unimportant. Let one killer kill for His glory, and He is guilty. Every man who suffers or causes suffering, every woman who is raped, every child who is tormented implicates Him. What, you need more? A hundred or a thousand? Listen: either He is responsible or He is not. If He is let’s judge Him; if He is not, let Him stop judging us.
 * Act I (p. 54)

 * BERISH: Prosecutor. That’s what I am going to be. Prosecutor. MARIA: What’s that? AVREMEL: That’s someone nice who has the right to be nasty.
 * Act II (p. 65)

 * MARIA: The people can say anything they please— MENDEL: Right. Under one condition: that they do not say it.
 * Act II (p. 77)

 * MARIA: Hell? Is he talking about hell? Good. For a moment I was afraid he was making sense.
 * Act II (p. 93)

 * SAM: Isn’t this a circus...of sorts? MENDEL: No. It’s theater. There is a difference. SAM: Really? What is it? MENDEL: A circus employs only clowns. SAM: So does the theater.
 * Act III (p. 120)

 * AVREMEL: You came to us from Zhironov? YANKEL: Were you there when— MENDEL: Yes, I was there. AVREMEL: How did you manage to escape? SAM: There is always one singled out to escape. YANKEL: A miracle! SAM: There is always someone to call it a miracle.
 * Act III (p. 146)

The Refugee (1985)

 * Opening essay, based on an earlier 1985 address in Tuscon, Arizona, in Sanctuary : A Resource Guide for Understanding and Participating in the Central American Refugees' Struggle by Gary MacEóin (1985)

What is it ? Here again I come to my Jewish tradition, and with delight I discover that when we speak of sanctuary in the Jewish tradition, it refers to human beings. '''Sanctuary, then, is not a place. Sanctuary is a human being. Any human being is a sanctuary. Every human being is a dwelling of God — man or woman or child, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist. Any person, by virtue of being a son or daughter of humanity, is a living sanctuary whom nobody has the right to invade.'''
 * When a state declares war on individuals, that means that something is wrong with that state. Then we have to find another concept of sanctuary.

We stood in line; there was a table with many gendarmes, feathers in their hats. We would come and give our papers. '''We were so naïve. We thought that we were protected by our papers.''' Therefore proudly we took out our citizenship papers certifying us as citizens of Hungary. May I tell you, my good friends, what we had to do in order to obtain those papers? I cannot begin to even tell you. I remember the pain and the anguish that some of us had to go through to prove that our great-great-grandfather was born in a particular village, or town. Finally, we got the papers, and we felt good about them. We felt safe. But then, when I approached the table, in the synagogue courtyard, the officer didn't even look at the papers. He took them, tore them up and threw them into the wastebasket. '''I thus became a refugee. That feeling of being a refugee lasted and lasted for many, many years — in fact, until I came to this country.'''
 * I remember when I became a refugee. Of all things it was on a Saturday, on the Sabbath. The gathering took place in the synagogue because the enemies, in their perverted imagination, tried so to hurt us that they sought to commit the worst crimes in our holiest place. Therefore they gathered the Jews in my town, Sighet, into the synagogue. And it is there that the first humiliation occurred.

 * You, who are so-called illegal aliens, must know that no human being is "illegal." That is a contradiction in terms. Human beings can be beautiful or more beautiful, they can be fat or skinny, they can be right or wrong, but illegal? How can a human being be illegal?

Nobel acceptance speech (1986)

 * Nobel acceptance speech (10 December 1986)

 * No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.

 * I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

 * Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must at that moment become the center of the universe.

 * As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs."

Hope, Despair, and Memory (1986)

 * Nobel Lecture (11 December 1986)

 * If anything can, it is memory that will save humanity.

 * Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future.

 * A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death.

 * Waking among the dead, one wondered if one was still alive. And yet real despair only seized us later. Afterwards. As we emerged from the nightmare and began to search for meaning.

 * It seemed as impossible to conceive of Auschwitz with God as to conceive of Auschwitz without God. Therefore, everything had to be reassessed because everything had changed. With one stroke, mankind's achievements seemed to have been erased. Was Auschwitz a consequence or an aberration of "civilization"? All we know is that Auschwitz called that civilization into question as it called into question everything that had preceded Auschwitz. Scientific abstraction, social and economic contention, nationalism, xenophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, mass hysteria. All found their ultimate expression in Auschwitz.

 * For us, forgetting was never an option. 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.

 * Of course some wars may have been necessary or inevitable, but none was ever regarded as holy. For us, a holy war is a contradiction in terms. War dehumanizes, war diminishes, war debases all those who wage it. The Talmud says, "Talmidei hukhamim marbin shalom baolam" (It is the wise men who will bring about peace). Perhaps, because wise men remember best.

 * How are we to reconcile our supreme duty towards memory with the need to forget that is essential to life? No generation has had to confront this paradox with such urgency. The survivors wanted to communicate everything to the living: the victim's solitude and sorrow, the tears of mothers driven to madness, the prayers of the doomed beneath a fiery sky.

 * After the war we reassured ourselves that it would be enough to relate a single night in Treblinka, to tell of the cruelty, the senselessness of murder, and the outrage born of indifference: it would be enough to find the right word and the propitious moment to say it, to shake humanity out of its indifference and keep the torturer from torturing ever again.

 * We thought it would be enough to tell of the tidal wave of hatred which broke over the Jewish people for men everywhere to decide once and for all to put an end to hatred of anyone who is "different" — whether black or white, Jew or Arab, Christian or Moslem — anyone whose orientation differs politically, philosophically, sexually.

 * We tried. It was not easy. At first, because of the language; language failed us. We would have to invent a new vocabulary, for our own words were inadequate, anemic. And then too, the people around us refused to listen; and even those who listened refused to believe; and even those who believed could not comprehend. Of course they could not. Nobody could. The experience of the camps defies comprehension.

 * If someone had told us in 1945 that in our lifetime religious wars would rage on virtually every continent, that thousands of children would once again be dying of starvation, we would not have believed it. Or that racism and fanaticism would flourish once again, we would not have believed it.

 * Terrorism must be outlawed by all civilized nations — not explained or rationalized, but fought and eradicated. Nothing can, nothing will justify the murder of innocent people and helpless children.

 * Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.

 * There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. The Talmud tells us that by saving a single human being, man can save the world.

 * None of us is in a position to eliminate war, but it is our obligation to denounce it and expose it in all its hideousness. War leaves no victors, only victims.

 * A destruction only man can provoke, only man can prevent. Mankind must remember that peace is not God's gift to his creatures, it is our gift to each other.

Misattributed

 * They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions.
 * Robert McAfee Brown. Preface for the 25th anniversary edition of Night. Page v, Bantam Books paperback; 1982 reissue edition.

Quotes about Wiesel

 * Elie Wiesel, in his novel The Testament, wrote, "Between a Jewish businessman from Morocco and a Jewish chemist from Chicago, a Jewish rag picker from Lodz and a Jewish industrialist from Lyon, a Jewish mystic from Safed and a Jewish intellectual from Minsk, there is a deeper and more substantive kinship, because it is far older, than between two gentile citizens of the same country, the same city and the same profession. A Jew may be alone but never solitary..." To which Hélène Elek, a revolutionary Hungarian Jew, replied, "I do not feel Jewish when I meet an orthodox Jew from Poland, for example. I tell myself that I have nothing in common with him. In Hungary, the Jews were assimilated, which I was very happy with. But I was never ashamed of being Jewish... You are a Communist first, and being a Jew comes second. You can be a very good Jew without Judaism."
 * Alain Brossat and Sylvia Klingberg, Revolutionary Yiddishland: A History of Jewish Radicalism (2016)

 * The wonderful Elie Wiesel says that we should never compare tragedies. All suffering, to the sufferer especially, is individual and unique.
 * 2012 interview included in Conversations with Edwidge Danticat edited by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (2017)

 * Most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. Oprah Winfrey comes to mind, as do Maya Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Elie Wiesel. Read the life history of any visionary, and you will find insights and passions that came from having dealt with devastation.
 * Bessel van der Kolk The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

 * Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and preeminent spokesman of the tragedy, has touched us all. The written word has been his way of speaking on behalf of the Jews who have suffered throughout history, as well as on behalf of all humankind. "Not to transmit an experience is to betray it," he comments. A character, obviously Wiesel himself, states in the Legends of Our Time: "The act of writing is for me often nothing more than the secret or conscious desire to carve words on a tombstone: to the memory of a town forever vanished, to the memory of a childhood in exile, to the memory of all those I loved and who, before I could tell them I loved them, went away."
 * Isaac Jack Levy 'And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust (1989)

 * It is the Committee's opinion that Elie Wiesel has emerged as one of the most important spiritual leaders and guides in an age when violence, repression and racism continue to characterise the world. Wiesel is a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity. His belief that the forces fighting evil in the world can be victorious is a hard-won belief. His message is based on his own personal experience of total humiliation and of the utter contempt for humanity shown in Hitler's death camps. The message is in the form of a testimony, repeated and deepened through the works of a great author.
 * Official Press Release of The Norwegian Nobel Committee (14 October 1986)

 * Elie Wiesel warned us that there may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
 * Maria Ressa How to Stand Up to a Dictator (2022)

 * Elie Wiesel, a pious Hungarian boy whose life had been circumscribed by Jewish faith until his arrest, discovered Western literature in Paris after the war and wrote his memoir under its formative influence ten years later, he began his literary odyssey as a Yiddish and Hebrew writer but then turned his first book into French and wrote thereafter in his adopted language, largely about his native Yiddish and Hebrew culture.
 * Ruth Wisse The Modern Jewish Canon (2000)

title: Elie Wiesel


text:
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross M.D. (8 July 1926 – 24 August 2004) was a psychiatrist, and a pioneer of near-death studies.

Quotes

 * People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
 * As quoted in The Leader's Digest : Timeless Principles for Team and Organization (2003) by Jim Clemmer, p. 84

 * As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.
 * As quoted in Another Door Opens (2006) by Jeffrey A. Wands. p. 29

 * We make progress in society only if we stop cursing and complaining about its shortcomings and have the courage to do something about them.
 * As quoted in Voyage of Purpose : Spiritual Wisdom from Near-Death Back to Life (2011) by David Bennett and Cindy Griffith-Bennett, p. 6; also at the official site of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation

 * Learn to get in touch with silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from. There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.
 * As quoted in "Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Messenger of Love" by Lennie Kronisch in Yoga Journal, Issue 11, November-December 1976, pp. 18-20

On Death and Dying (1969)

 * We have to ask ourselves whether medicine is to remain a humanitarian and respected profession or a new but depersonalized science in the service of prolonging life rather than diminishing human suffering.
 * Ch. 2

 * There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.
 * Ch. 2

 * Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
 * Ch. 9

 * Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.

 * Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

Death: The Final Stage of Growth (1975)

 * It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.
 * Ch. 2

 * Those who have been immersed in the tragedy of massive death during wartime, and who have faced it squarely, never allowing their senses and feelings to become numbed and indifferent, have emerged from their experiences with growth and humanness greater than that achieved through almost any other means.
 * Ch. 5

 * Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.
 * Ch. 6

Quotes about

 * The Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross changed western cultural resistance to dealing with death, and the teaching of how to accept it... Kubler-Ross's best known contribution to the study, thanatology, that she had helped to create, was the five stages of dying people go through. She described them - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance - in her bestseller On Death And Dying (1969), written in two months. Not everyone experiences all five, she cautioned, but at least two are always present.  The definition, reached after scores of interviews with people facing imminent death, helped the medical profession to deal with a factor it had long refused to acknowledge, especially in the US... She wrote more than 20 books.. A firm believer in a god and the life hereafter, she became fascinated with near-death experiences and an advocate for people's stories of seeing a shining light and familiar faces, before being brought back from the brink.
 * Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Obituary, by Christopher Reed, The Guardian, (30 Aug 2004)

title: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross


text:
Nat Friedman

Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born 6 August 1977) is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub, and former Chairman of the GNOME Foundation.

Quotes

 * People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment...But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity."

 * The whole youth-idolatry oh-god-not-another-birthday thing has to be the most sure-fire way to be unhappy about the way things are progressing in your life.

 * If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop.

title: Nat Friedman


text:
Claude Debussy

Achille-Claude Debussy (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer, prominent in the style commonly referred to as Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term.

Quotes

 * The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.
 * Letter to Ernest Chausson (1894)

 * I confess that I am no longer thinking in musical terms, or at least not much, even though I believe with all my heart that Music remains for all time the finest means of expression we have. It’s just that I find the actual pieces — whether they’re old or modern, which is in any case merely a matter of dates — so totally poverty-stricken, manifesting an inability to see beyond the work-table. They smell of the lamp, not of the sun. And then, overshadowing everything, there’s the desire to amaze one’s colleagues with arresting harmonies, quite unnecessary for the most part. In short, these days especially, music is devoid of emotional impact. I feel that, without descending to the level of the gossip column or the novel, it should be possible to solve the problem somehow. There’s no need either for music to make people think! … It would be enough if music could make people listen, despite themselves and despite their petty mundane troubles, and never mind if they’re incapable of expressing anything resembling an opinion. It would be enough if they could no longer recognize their own grey, dull faces, if they felt that for a moment they had been dreaming of an imaginary country, that’s to say, one that can’t be found on the map.
 * Letter to Paul Dukas (1901)

 * Collect impressions. Don’t be in a hurry to write them down. Because that’s something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture — a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is.
 * Debussy in a letter to his pupil Raoul Bardac (1906)

 * Every sound perceived by the acute ear in the rhythm of the world about us can be represented musically. Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear.
 * Statement of 1910, as quoted in Debussy on Music (1977) edited and translated by Françoise Lesure and Richard Langham Smith, p. 243

 * The worship of Adonis is united with that of Christ.
 * On the tale of Saint Sebastian, as told by Gabriele d'Annunzio in the play Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911), for which he wrote the music, as quoted in Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933) by Léon Vallas, p. 225. Shortly before its opening, the Archbishop of Paris declared the work offensive to Christian consciences, and forbid French Catholics to attend upon pain of excommunication.

 * Do you really think that my music is devoid of religious antecedents? Do you wish to put an artist's soul under restraint? Do you find it difficult to conceive that one who sees mystery in everything — in the song of the sea, in the curve of the horizon, in the wind and in the call of the birds — should have been attracted to a religious subject? I have no profession of faith to utter to you: but, whichever my creed may be, no great effort on my part was needed to raise me to the height of d'Annunzio's mysticism. I can assure you that my music was written in exactly the spirit as if it had been commissioned for performance in church. Have I succeeded in expressing all that I felt? It is for others to decide. Is the faith which my music expresses orthodox? I do not know; but I can say that it is my own, expressed in all sincerity.
 * On his music for Le martyre de St. Sébastien (1911), in a 1911 interview, as quoted in Dancing in the Vortex : The Story of Ida Rubinstein (2001) by Vicki Woolfe, p. 56

 * I do not practise religion in accordance with the sacred rites. I have made mysterious Nature my religion. I do not believe that a man is any nearer to God for being clad in priestly garments, nor that one place in a town is better adapted to meditation than another. When I gaze at a sunset sky and spend hours contemplating its marvelous ever-changing beauty, an extraordinary emotion overwhelms me. Nature in all its vastness is truthfully reflected in my sincere though feeble soul. Around me are the trees stretching up their branches to the skies, the perfumed flowers gladdening the meadow, the gentle grass-carpetted earth, … and my hands unconsciously assume an attitude of adoration. … To feel the supreme and moving beauty of the spectacle to which Nature invites her ephemeral guests! … that is what I call prayer.
 * As quoted in Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933) by Léon Vallas, p. 225
 * Variant translation: Before the passing sky, in long hours of contemplation of its magnificent and ever-changing beauty, I am seized by an incomparable emotion. The whole expanse of nature is reflected in my own sincere and feeble soul. Around me the branches of trees reach out toward the firmament, here are sweet-scented flowers smiling in the meadow, here the soft earth is carpeted with sweet herbs. … Nature invites its ephemeral and trembling travelers to experience these wonderful and disturbing spectacles — that is what I call prayer.
 * As quoted in The Life of the Creative Spirit (2001) by H. Charles Romesburg, p. 240

 * I wish to write down my musical dreams in a spirit of utter self-detachment. I wish to sing of my interior visions with the naïve candour of a child. No doubt, this simple musical grammar will jar on some people. It is bound to offend the partisans of deceit and artifice. I foresee that and rejoice at it. I shall do nothing to create adversaries, but neither shall I do anything to turn enmities into friendships. I must endeavour to be a great artist so that I may dare to be myself and suffer for my faith. Those who feel as I do will only appreciate me more. The others will shun and hate me. I shall make no effort to appease them. On that distant day — I trust it is still very far off — when I shall no longer be a cause of strife, I shall feel bitter self-reproach. For that odious hypocrisy which enables one to please all mankind will inevitably have prevailed in those last works.
 * As quoted in Claude Debussy: His Life and Works (1933) by Léon Vallas, p. 226

 * The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous may happen.
 * As quoted in ''Music in the Modern World (1948) by Rollo Hugh Myers, p. 99
 * Variant translation: The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous might happen.
 * As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 10

 * Music should humbly seek to please; within these limits great beauty may perhaps be found. Extreme complication is contrary to art. Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.
 * Quoted in French Music : From the Death of Berlioz to the Death of Fauré (1951) by Martin Cooper, p. 136, and in Debussy and Wagner (1979) by Robin Holloway, p. 207

 * A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.
 * On Richard Wagner as quoted in TIME (7 December 1953)

 * Is it not our duty to find the symphonic formula which fits our time, one which progress, daring and modern victory demand? The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
 * As quoted in Music in History : The Evolution of an Art (1957) by Howard Decker McKinney and William Robert Anderson, p. 640
 * Variant: The century of aeroplanes deserves its own music. As there are no precedents, I must create anew.
 * As quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 69

 * People don't very much like things that are beautiful —  they are so far from their nasty little minds.
 * As quoted in Debussy : Musician of France (1957) by Victor Illyitch Seroff, p. 172

 * Music expresses the motion of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.
 * As quoted in The Twentieth Century (1972) by Caroline Farrar Ware, p. 222
 * Variant translation: Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

 * How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
 * As quoted in Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 351

 * The music I desire must be supple enough to adapt itself to the lyrical effusions of the soul and the fantasy of dreams.
 * As quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 194

 * There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
 * Quoted in An Encyclopedia of Quotations About Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 268
 * Unsourced variant: There is no theory. You have only to listen. Fantasy is the law.

 * Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called "common sense", which is the most dreadful thing I know — after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
 * Debussy Letters (1987) edited by Francois Lesure and Roger Nichols

 * Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.
 * As quoted in Greatness : Who Makes History and Why by Dean Keith Simonton, p. 110

 * First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you must forget that you are singers.
 * Instructions to the singers in his opera Pelléas et Mélisande, as quoted in 100 Great Operas and Their Stories (1989) by Henry William Simon, p. 371

 * Music would take over at the point at which words become powerless, with the one and only object of expressing that which nothing but music could express. For this, I need a text by a poet who, resorting to discreet suggestion rather than full statement, will enable me to graft my dream upon his dream — who will give me plain human beings in a setting belonging to no particular period or country. … Then I do not wish my music to drown the words, nor to delay the course of the action. I want no purely musical developments which are not called for inevitably by the text. In opera there is always too much singing. Music should be as swift and mobile as the words themselves.
 * As quoted in Debussy (1989) by Paul Holmes, p. 36

 * Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.
 * As quoted in Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought (1992) by John Paynter, p. 590
 * Unsourced variant: Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

 * Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little — the book of Nature.
 * As quoted in The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996) by Don Michael Randel

 * What I am trying to do is something different — an effect of reality, but what some fools call Impressionism, a term that is usually misapplied, especially by the critics who don't hesitate to apply it to Turner, the greatest creator of mysterious effects in the whole world of art.
 * As quoted in The Lives of the Great Composers (1997) by Harold C. Schonberg, p. 464

 * Music is the space between the notes.
 * As quoted in Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving (2001) by Jonathan G. Koomey, p. 96; since at least 2010 similar statements are also sometimes attributed to Mozart, and a similar remark, apparently one of Ben Jonson, is quoted in "Notes to Cynthia's Revels, in The Works of Ben Jonson: With Notes Critical and Explanatory, and a Biographical Memoir (1875), edited by William Gifford, Vol. 2, in notes to p. 223, on p. 551: Division, in music, is "the space between the notes of music, or the dividing of the tones."
 * Unsourced variants:
 * Music is the silence between the notes.
 * The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.
 * The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.

 * It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.
 * As quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (2003) by Simon Trezise, p. 120

The Life of the Creative Spirit

 * Quotations from The Life of the Creative Spirit (2001) by H. Charles Romesburg, p. 239 - 240

 * Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. … Let us not disillusion anyone by bringing too much reality into the dream.
 * Unsourced variant: Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

 * I believe the principle fault of the majority of writers and artists is having neither the will nor the courage to break with their successes, failing to seek new paths and give birth to new ideas. Most of them produce them twice, three, even four times. They have neither the courage nor the temerity to leave what is certain for what is uncertain. There is, however, no greater pleasure than going into the depth of oneself, setting one's whole being in motion and seeking for new and hidden treasures. What a joy to find something new in oneself, something that surprises even ourselves, filling us with warmth.

 * Search for a discipline within freedom! Don't let yourelf be governed by formulae drawn from decadent philosophies: they are for the feeble-minded. Listen to no one's advice except that of the wind in the trees. That can recount the whole history of mankind...

 * To complete a work is just like being present at the death of someone you love.
 * On his opera Pelléas et Mélisande

Quotes about Debussy

 * When Claude Debussy studied at the Paris Conservatory from age ten to age twenty-two, many considered him a rebel because of his treatment of dissonance and his disdain for the established forms. He reputedly turned to a fellow student during a performance of Beethoven with the words, “Let’s go. He’s starting to develop.”
 * Ruth Ruggles Akers, in "Vive la France, March 19" at The Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra site (2010)

 * I don't know what life would be like without music. In my lonely times, music has been my closest friend. It has also been my doctor-and my lover, in the sense that I sometimes listen to music and dream of a lover that doesn't exist. Late at night, when I don't feel sleepy, I'll play music-all types of music and lose myself in its mystery. I might decide to play Stevie Wonder, or Debussy, or Tchaikovsky. It depends on my mood.
 * 1977 interview in Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989)

 * I love Italian opera — it’s so reckless. Damn Richard Wagner, and his bellowings at Fate and death. Damn Debussy, and his averted face. I like the Italians who run all on impulse, and don’t care about their immortal souls, and don’t worry about the ultimate.
 * D. H. Lawrence in a letter (1 April 1911) in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence Vol. 1 (1979), edited by James T. Boulton

 * Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon — a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary...
 * Wilfrid Mellers, Foreword to Images: The Piano Music of Claude Debussy (2001), p. xi

 * When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir — "whatever I please" — and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity...
 * Wilfrid Mellers, Ibid., p. xii

 * An examination of the harmonic techniques out of their context has all too often led to misleading terminology such as 'static' or 'non-functional' as a description of Debussy's harmonic methods. Viewed as a whole, however, the tonal coherence of his music depends upon a carefully calculated and often dramatic interaction of these various harmonic 'types' with each other and with orthodox diatonic harmony. The result is a tonal language, but one which is fundamentally different in concept from classical tonality. The detailed classifications of harmonic events is no longer possible in Debussy's music where the central tonality of a work emerges only through a constant focusing and re-focusing on harmonic types.
 * Jim Samson in Music in Transition: A Study of Tonal Expansion and Atonality, 1900-1920 (1977), p. 38 ISBN 0393021939

 * The Sea of Debussy does not call for many words of comment. The three parts of which it is composed are entitled From Dawn till Noon, Play of the Waves and Dialogue of the Wind and the Sea, but as far as any pictorial suggestiveness is concerned, they might as well have been entitled On the Flatiron Building, Slumming in the Bowery and A Glimpse of Chinatown During a Raid. Debussy's music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?... Even his orchestration is not particularly remarkable.
 * New York Post, 22 March 1907, criticising Debussy's first performance of La Mer (which was described by The New York Times as "persistently ugly"), as quoted in The New York times book review (1977), volume 82, p. 27

 * Among all our musical masters, l should say, Claude Debussy was the least weighed upon by the dead hand of formula. Yet neither was he an improviser. This latter art, indeed, among all the compositional techniques, is the one most servile to rules of thumb. Debussy's operation was more thorough. Like any Frenchman building a bridge or cooking a meal, painting a picture or laying out a garden, he felt, he imagined, he reasoned, he constructed—and in that order.
 * Virgil Thomson, Foreword to Schmitz's The Piano Works of Claude Debussy (1950), p. ix-x

title: Claude Debussy