Primo Levi Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

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: 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.

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
The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.

Primo Levi
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. 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
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
As happens with all well-structured exhibits, indeed as happens anytime one partakes of spiritual food, one leaves the exhibit nourished and at the same time hungrier than before.

Primo Levi
You should be conscious of your impact in real life.

Primo Levi
[The therapy] was found pretty soon, drawing on good inorganic chemistry, that distant Cartesian island, a lost paradise, for us organic chemists, bunglers, "students of gunk".

Primo Levi
The Fascist censors were intelligent, in their way. Admitting something and excluding something else.

Primo Levi
I was fond of chemistry, so I refused the humanistic teaching of literature, but as matters go it entered me through the skin without my knowing.

Primo Levi
The sky is strewn with horrible dead suns, Dense sediments of mangled atoms. Only desperate heaviness emanates from them, Not energy, not messages, not particles, not light. Light itself falls back down, broken by its own weight.

Primo Levi
The lab is a place for the young, and returning there you feel young again: with the same longing for adventure, discovery, and the unexpected that you have at seventeen.

Primo Levi
All honor to the pickax and its modern equivalents; they are still the most important intermediaries in the millennial dialogue between the elements and man.

Primo Levi
To botch an analysis was worse: perhaps because unconsciously one realized that the judgment of men (in this case the professors) is arbitrary and debatable, while the judgment of things is always inexorable and just: this law is the same for all.

Primo Levi
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
It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)

Primo Levi
Dawn came on us like a betrayer; it seemed as though the new sun rose as an ally of our enemies to assist in our destruction.

Primo Levi
Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is gray and its salts are colorless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal.

Primo Levi
Evolution has always proved itself to be enormously more intelligent than the best evolutionists.

Primo Levi
A chemist cannot find, already in his mind, the laws and the phenomena which govern matter.

Primo Levi
There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.

Primo Levi
In running through a list of names of minerals one is confronted by an orgy of personalities. It would seem that no mineralogist was ever resigned to ending his career without linking his name to a mineral, adding to the ending -ite as a laurel wreath: garnierite, senarmontite, and thousands of others.

Primo Levi
Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differential calculus.

Primo Levi
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. 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
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.

Primo Levi
One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.
Variant translation: A single Anne Frank arouses more emotion than the myriad others who suffered like her but whose images have remained in the shadows. Maybe things are this way out of necessity; if we had to and could suffer the suffering of everybody, we would be unable to live

Primo Levi
Beware of analogies: for millenia they corrupted medicine, and it may be their fault that today's pedagogical systems are so numerous, and after three thousand years of argument we still don't know which is best.

Primo Levi
I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.

Primo Levi
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. 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.

Primo Levi