If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
PRIMO LEVIWe have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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After 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.
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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
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To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
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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.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away.
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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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If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one’s desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.
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There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.
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Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
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We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
PRIMO LEVI