To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.
PRIMO LEVII’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
PRIMO LEVI -
We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
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Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
PRIMO LEVI -
There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
PRIMO LEVI -
Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVI -
I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself
PRIMO LEVI -
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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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






