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.
PRIMO LEVII 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.
More Primo Levi Quotes
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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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.
PRIMO LEVI -
Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself
PRIMO LEVI -
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 LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It’s not a philosophical virtue. It’s a habit of having my second reactions before the first.
PRIMO LEVI -
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:.
PRIMO LEVI -
Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
PRIMO LEVI -
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.
PRIMO LEVI -
We are those who, through prevarication, skill or luck, never touched bottom. Those who have, and who have seen the face of the Gorgon, did not return, or returned wordless.
PRIMO LEVI






