The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.
PRIMO LEVIAnyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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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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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What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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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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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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But they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith “in the validity of Maxwell’s or Boltzmann’s equations,” and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA.
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The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong.
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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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The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
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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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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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There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
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They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable.
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Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.
PRIMO LEVI