The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
PRIMO LEVIWe will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz
More Primo Levi Quotes
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I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself
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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
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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 LEVI -
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 LEVI -
Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.
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.
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
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If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
PRIMO LEVI -
They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
PRIMO LEVI -
The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.
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 -
To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one’s becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
PRIMO LEVI






