Primo Levi Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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The aims of life are the best defense against death.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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