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 LEVIAn enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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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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.
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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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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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In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: ‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.
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To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
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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.
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Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
PRIMO LEVI