Primo Levi Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

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
[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
Is anything sadder than a train
That 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 shafts
And unable even to look sideways.

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
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
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
Twenty billion years before now, Brilliant, soaring in space and time There was a ball of flame, solitary, eternal, Our common father and our executioner. It exploded, and every change began. Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe Resounds from the furthest reaches.

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

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
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
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
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
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
Our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.
Of a year spent in Auschwitz

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
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.

Primo Levi