If you have shed a thousand tears, expect a thousand blessings.

Savor powerlessness, after power, in every phase that matches it precisely; replace every old triumph with the new defeat; strengthen yourself on your weakness; win yourself back when so very lost.

The main theme remains constant: man owes it to himself to reject despair; better to rely on miracles than opt for resignation. By changing himself, man can change the world.

From Jeff Greenfield: I once asked Elie Wiesel Are you an optimist or a pessimist? An optimist, he said. I have to be.

Judge God. He created the universe and made justice stem from injustices. He brought it about that a people should attain happiness through tears, that the freedom of a nation, like that of a man, should be a monument built upon a pile, a foundation of dead bodies…

Most people thought that 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.

All right, I told myself. I'll also have to learn to eat. And to love. You can learn anything.

Suffering confers no privileges; it is what one does with suffering that matters.

We are not asked to SEE, said Amy. Why need we when we KNOW? We know--not the answer to the inevitable Why, but the incontestable fact that it is for the best. It is an irreparable loss, but is it faith at all if it is 'hard to trust' when things are entirely bewildering?

Failure means nothing now, only that it taught me life.

The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God.

Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I'm willing to take it because I trust Him.