Primo Levi Quotes - Page 3

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• This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. 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.

  Primo Levi

  Dream, Real, Past

  Primo Levi (1986). “If this is a Man: Remembering Auschwitz”

  9 Copy quote

• After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. 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

  Love, Kings, Science

  "Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations" by Carl C. Gaither, Springer Science & Business Media, (p. 101), January 5, 2012.

  19 Copy quote

• 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.

  Primo Levi

  Men, Clothes, Justice

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

  5 Copy quote

• I'm a libertine, but it's not my specialty.

  Primo Levi

  Libertine, Specialty

  Primo Levi (1987). “The Wrench”

  10 Copy quote

• Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

  Primo Levi

  Later In Life, Perfect, Joy

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.17, Simon and Schuster

  16 Copy quote

• Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.

  Primo Levi

  Nature, Gossip, Relief

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Philosophical, Firsts, Virtue

  4 Copy quote

• Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [. . . ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.

  Primo Levi

  Stories, Equal, Oneself

  7 Copy quote

• 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 Levi

  Heart, Brain, Exaltation

  7 Copy quote

• At that time I had not yet been taught the doctrine I was later to learn so hurriedly in the Lager: that man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly

  Primo Levi

  Mean, Men, Survival

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

  7 Copy quote

• For he who loses all often easily loses himself.

  Primo Levi

  Loses

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Primo Levi

  Understanding, Tables, Matter

  Primo Levi (1995). “The Periodic Table”, Schocken

  57 Copy quote

• A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he?

  Primo Levi

  Men, Wells

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Horse, Voice, Two

  9 Copy quote

• 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. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.

  Primo Levi

  Running, Writing, Cells

  4 Copy quote

• The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

  Primo Levi

  Degradation, Defeat, Conclusion

  Primo Levi (1996). “Survival In Auschwitz”, p.171, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

• Today I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

  Primo Levi

  Thinking, Age, Today

  Survival in Auschwitz ch. 17 (1960) (translation by Stuart Woolf )

  4 Copy quote

• But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine's inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, "What happened with those two?" and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else.

  Primo Levi

  Sex, Men, Two

  7 Copy quote

• He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?

  Primo Levi

  Gymnastics, Men, Creation Of Man

  4 Copy quote

• Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. 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, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.

  Primo Levi

  Ideas, Alchemist, Gold

  6 Copy quote

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