Primo Levi Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

[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
In countries and epochs in which communication is impeded, soon all other liberties wither; discussion dies by inanition, ignorance of the opinion of others becomes rampant, imposed opinions triumph. The well-known example of this is the crazy genetics preached in the USSR by Lysenko, which in the absence of discussion (his opponents were exiled to Siberia) compromised the harvests for twenty years. Intolerance is inclined to censor, and censorship promotes ignorance of the arguments of others and thus intolerance itself: a rigid, vicious circle that is hard to break.

Primo Levi
My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

Primo Levi
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
Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own.

Primo Levi
Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can.

Primo Levi
What to do now? How to detach yourself?
With every work that's born you die a little.

Primo Levi
Up to the moment of this writing... the Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.

Primo Levi
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
It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is.

Primo Levi
The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz), teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. Nitrogen is nitrogen, it passes miraculously from the air into plants, from these into animals, and from animals into us; when its function in our body is exhausted, we eliminate it, but it still remains nitrogen, aseptic, innocent.

Primo Levi