We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.
PRIMO LEVII’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
More Primo Levi Quotes
-
-
I 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 LEVI -
I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.
PRIMO LEVI -
If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVI -
The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
PRIMO LEVI -
Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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 -
Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.
PRIMO LEVI -
Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.
PRIMO LEVI -
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
PRIMO LEVI -
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 LEVI -
At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
PRIMO LEVI