Top 95 Primo Levi Quotes
#1. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.
Primo Levi
#2. Is anything sadder than a trainThat 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 shaftsAnd unable even to look sideways.
Primo Levi
#3. 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
#4. Real problems sooner or later are resolved; on the contrary, pseudoproblems are not.
Primo Levi
#5. Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.
Primo Levi
#6. 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
#7. It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.
Primo Levi
#8. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz's Arbeit), gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.
Primo Levi
#9. 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
#10. For a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
Primo Levi
#11. I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
Primo Levi
#12. 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
#13. 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 ...
Primo Levi
#14. For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
Primo Levi
#15. 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
#16. The truck went on its way in the night and Gedaleh shouted, laughing, If not this way, how? And if not now, when?
Primo Levi
#17. Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man.
Primo Levi
#18. There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
Primo Levi
#19. An enemy who sees the error of his ways ceases to be an enemy.
Primo Levi
#20. From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.
Primo Levi
#21. We become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear.
Primo Levi
#22. I will tell just one more story ... and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.
Primo Levi
#23. She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?" And they had replied: "It is we who are burning.
Primo Levi
#24. ... in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.
Primo Levi
#25. The institution represented an attempt to shift onto others - specifically, the victims - the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.
Primo Levi
#26. 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
#27. Our ignorance allowed us to live, as you are in the mountains, and your rope is frayed and about to break, but you don't know it and feel safe.
Primo Levi
#28. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.
Primo Levi
#29. 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
#30. A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he?
Primo Levi
#31. I'm a libertine, but it's not my specialty.
Primo Levi
#32. 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
#33. Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.
Primo Levi
#34. Until one day there will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow.
Primo Levi
#35. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting. by Primo Levi in Drowned
Primo Levi
#36. He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
Primo Levi
#37. Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion
Primo Levi
#38. 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
#39. The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.
Primo Levi
#40. In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain.
Primo Levi
#41. I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.
Primo Levi
#42. What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I have never dealt in eggs?
Primo Levi
#43. 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
#44. The aims of life are the best defense against death.
Primo Levi
#45. 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
#46. Man's capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study.
Primo Levi
#47. Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.
Primo Levi
#48. Get up: the illusory barrier of the warm blankets, the thin armor of sleep, the nightly evasion with its very torments drops to pieces around us, and we find ourselves mercilessly awake, exposed to insult, atrociously naked and vulnerable. A
Primo Levi
#49. 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
#50. Conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev's Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were learning to unravel, was poetry ...
Primo Levi
#51. In every part of the world, wherever you begin by denying the fundamental liberties of mankind, and equality among people, you move toward the concentration camp system, and it is a road on which it is difficult to halt.
Primo Levi
#52. We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us our in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stands the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.
Primo Levi
#53. Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?
Primo Levi
#54. For us, on the contrary, the Lager is not a punishment; for us, no end is foreseen and the Lager is nothing but a manner of living assigned to us, without limits of time, in the bosom of the Germanic social organism.
Primo Levi
#55. In our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen. What
Primo Levi
#56. Fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away.
Primo Levi
#57. No one must leave here and so carry to the world, together with the sign impressed on his skin, the evil tidings of what man's presumption made of man in Auschwitz.
Primo Levi
#58. The door opened with a crash, and 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
#59. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.
Primo Levi
#60. Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.
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#61. How can one hit a man without anger?
Primo Levi
#62. This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.
Primo Levi
#63. We are not dissatisfied with our choices and with what life has
given us, but when we meet we both have a curious and not unpleasant
impression that a veil, a breath, a throw of the dice deflected us
onto two divergent paths, which were not ours.
Primo Levi
#64. Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.
Primo Levi
#65. If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
Primo Levi
#66. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.
Primo Levi
#67. If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? If not now, when?
Primo Levi
#68. We the survivors are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses, those in possession of the unspeakable truth are the drowned, the dead, the disappeared.
Primo Levi
#69. Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment ...
Primo Levi
#70. ... We also have friends among the railroad men, and they tell us that so far the Germans of the garrison haven't dared touch the pumpkins. They've blocked the line and have brought in a team of mine detectors from Cracow. They're more worried about the pumpkins than about the car you stole.
Primo Levi
#71. 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
#72. He fights for his life but still remains everybody's friend. He "knows" whom to corrupt, whom to avoid, whose compassion to arouse, whom to resist.
Primo Levi
#73. (this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)
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#74. Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.
Primo Levi
#75. Why does it happen? Why is the pain of every day translated so constantly into our dreams, in the ever-repeated scene of the unlistened-to story?
Primo Levi
#76. Does not ingenuity consist in the finding or creating of connections between apparently extraneous orders of ideas?)
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#77. I do not know what I will think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.
Primo Levi
#78. Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [ ... ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.
Primo Levi
#79. The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi's writing.
Primo Levi
#80. Nostalgia is a fragile and tender anguish, basically different, more intimate, more human than the other pains we had endured till then [ ... ] Nostalgia is a limpid and clean pain, but demanding; it permeates every minute of the day, permits no other thoughts and induces a need for escape.
Primo Levi
#81. 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
#83. 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
#84. We cannot understand [Fascism], but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard ... because what happened can happen again ... For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened.
Primo Levi
#85. I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.
Primo Levi
#86. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.
Primo Levi
#87. He never asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.
Primo Levi
#88. But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.
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#89. The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
Primo Levi
#90. He understood before any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining or commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the beginning.
Primo Levi
#91. Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
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#92. Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.
Primo Levi
#93. Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.
Primo Levi
#94. This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standing on our feet, with a tap which drips while we cannot drink the water, and we wait for something which will certainly be terrible, and nothing happens and nothing continues to happen.
Primo Levi
#95. To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.
Primo Levi
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