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.
PRIMO LEVIA scientist’s life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed:.
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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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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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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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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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Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience.
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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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Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.
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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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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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Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
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For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.
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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 sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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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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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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The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
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Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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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.
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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.
PRIMO LEVI