Nothing 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.
PRIMO LEVIThis 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
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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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The principle of order in me, around me, and in the world… I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.
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Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species – we, in short – had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
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Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.
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Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics.
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What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
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The aims of life are the best defense against death.
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Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous.
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Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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.
PRIMO LEVI