He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
PRIMO LEVIBut they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith “in the validity of Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s equations,” and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.
PRIMO LEVI -
A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
PRIMO LEVI -
To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.
PRIMO LEVI -
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
PRIMO LEVI -
This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described.
PRIMO LEVI -
If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
PRIMO LEVI -
There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
PRIMO LEVI -
The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVI -
At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVI -
If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVI -
It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.
PRIMO LEVI -
If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
PRIMO LEVI -
The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
PRIMO LEVI -
We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz
PRIMO LEVI -
We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
PRIMO LEVI