The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
PRIMO LEVIThe sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
PRIMO LEVIThis is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
PRIMO LEVIEverybody is somebody’s Jew.
PRIMO LEVIToday I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
PRIMO LEVIA 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.
PRIMO LEVIEach of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
PRIMO LEVII 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.
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.
PRIMO LEVIA 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 LEVIIn 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:.
PRIMO LEVIThe living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVINever 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.
PRIMO LEVIAfter the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.
PRIMO LEVII have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It’s not a philosophical virtue. It’s a habit of having my second reactions before the first.
PRIMO LEVIThe obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
PRIMO LEVIThe aims of life are the best defense against death.
PRIMO LEVI