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.
PRIMO LEVIWe who survived the Camps are not true witnesses.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer.
PRIMO LEVI -
The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
PRIMO LEVI -
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
PRIMO LEVI -
Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
PRIMO LEVI -
They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI