And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose… - Elie Wiesel

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And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. It is a friend that you communicate the awakening of a desire, the birth of a vision or a terror, the anguish of seeing the sun disappear or of finding that order and justice are no more. That's what you can talk about with a friend. Is the soul immortal, and if so why are we afraid to die? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end? What is death, when you come down to it? The closing of a parenthesis, and nothing more? And what about life? In the mouth of a philosopher, these questions may have a false ring, but asked during adolescence or friendship, they have the power to change being: a look burns and ordinary gestures tend to transcend themselves. What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his, and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him who you can hold your tongue without shame and talk freely without risk. That's it.

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About 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.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Eliezer Wiesel A-7713 Élie Wiesel
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Additional quotes by Elie Wiesel

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.

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.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

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