The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVITo 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one’s own.
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I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself
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Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.
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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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He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
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Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable.
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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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We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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We have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone.
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Everybody is somebody’s Jew.
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At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
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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.
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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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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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I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
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A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.
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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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Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization.
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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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The problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete.
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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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We will not return No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
PRIMO LEVI