Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
PRIMO LEVIImagine 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
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Is anything sadder than a trainThat leaves when it’s supposed to,That has only one voice,Only one route?There’s nothing sadder.Except perhaps a cart horse,Shut between two shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.
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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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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.
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A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?
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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 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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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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This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real.
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Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument.
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The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium.
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I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
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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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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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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.
PRIMO LEVI






