I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.
PRIMO LEVIWhat 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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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Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry.
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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 new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
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The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it.
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This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described.
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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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At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
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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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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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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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Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end.
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The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead.
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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.
PRIMO LEVI