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.
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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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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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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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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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We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
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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 work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
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I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.
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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.
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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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Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species – we, in short – had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
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If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?
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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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For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
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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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Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.
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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
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If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
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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.
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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
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The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
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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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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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My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
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Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
PRIMO LEVI