Primo Levi Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

We collected in a group in front of their door, and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed in every century.

Primo Levi
But there is trouble in store for anyone who surrenders to the temptation of mistaking an elegant hypothesis for a certainty: the readers of detective stories know this quite well.

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

Primo Levi
I 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.

Primo Levi
To give a name to a thing is as gratifying as giving a name to an island, but it is also dangerous: the danger consists in one's becoming convinced that all is taken care of and that once named, the phenomenon has also been explained.

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
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
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
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
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
You should be conscious of your impact in real life.

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

Primo Levi
I read somewhere — and the person who wrote this was not a mountaineer but a sailor — that the sea's only gifts are harsh blows and, occasionally, the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone, with nothing to help you but your own hands and your own head.

Primo Levi
It is a pretty structure isn't it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that beautiful edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.

Primo Levi
To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn't.

Primo Levi
The dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a millennial anger.

Primo Levi
We who survived the Camps are not true witnesses. 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
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.

Primo Levi
If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?

Primo Levi
A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

Primo Levi
Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.

Primo Levi
If it is true that there is no greater sorrow than to remember a happy time in a state of misery, it is just as true that calling up a moment of anguish in a tranquil mood, seated quietly at one's desk, is a source of profound satisfaction.

Primo Levi
Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.

Primo Levi
An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.

Primo Levi