Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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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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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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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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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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I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
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Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn’t always equal to oneself.
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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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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.
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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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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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I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
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At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
PRIMO LEVI