There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
PRIMO LEVINothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one’s own.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
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One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.
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Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
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For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
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If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
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To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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But 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.
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.
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In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed:.
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The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.
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At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVI