An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVIThe butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don’t know it and feel safe.
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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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The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
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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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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
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Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.
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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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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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We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.
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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.
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The principle of order in me, around me, and in the world… I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.
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Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.
PRIMO LEVI