A scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.
PRIMO LEVIThere is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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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.
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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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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.
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We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
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It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)
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There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
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I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
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I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.
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Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.
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It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
PRIMO LEVI






