Primo Levi famous quotes

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

#Skills #Luck #Faces

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

#Inspiration #Men #Dust

Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.
-- Primo Levi

#Believe #Asking Questions #Numbers

The aims of life are the best defense against death.
-- Primo Levi

#Death #Aim Of Life #Defense

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.
-- Primo Levi

#Civilization #Skeletons #Stories

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

#Courage #Men #Dignity

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
-- Primo Levi

#Atheist #Auschwitz

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime. 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

#Stupid #Heart #Lazy

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
-- Primo Levi

#Order #Diversity #Growth

We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experience, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.
-- Primo Levi

#Fundamentals #Events #Unexpected

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
-- Primo Levi

#Love #Kings #Squares

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

#Gossip #Pieces #Relief

The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.
-- Primo Levi

#Country #Retirement #Military

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.
-- Primo Levi

#This Day

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

#Ignorance #Mountain #Safe

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

#Rose #Enemy #Sun

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

#Would Be #Remakes #Deny

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

#Beautiful #Home #House

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. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
-- Primo Levi

#Perfect #Joy #Realization

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

#Country #Powerful #Men

Everybody is somebody's Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.
-- Primo Levi

#Today #Palestinian #Jew

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.
-- Primo Levi

#Waiting

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

#Horse #Two #Voice

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

#Men #Looks #Violence

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

#Memories #Men #Clothes

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

#Hero #Men #Views

The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
-- Primo Levi

#Country #Believe #Science

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

#Taken #Names #Islands

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

#Mean #Home #Way

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

#Grief #Doors #Land

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

#Mean #Men #Survival

The sea's only gifts are harsh blows and occasionally the chance to feel strong.
-- Primo Levi

#Strong #Blow #Sea

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

#Errors #Enemy #Way

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.
-- Primo Levi

#Country #Air #Ideas

He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good
-- Primo Levi

#Writing #Heart #Language

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

#Profound #Sorrow #Calling

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

#Memories #Lying #Years

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

#Dream #Real #Past

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

#Thinking #Age #Today

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of me who is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic minuscule game which nobody has yet described. It is that which at this instant, issuing out of a labyrinthine tangle of yeses and nos, makes my hand run along a certain path on the paper, mark it with these volutes that are signs: a double snap, up and down, between two levels of energy, guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one.
-- Primo Levi

#Running #Writing #Cells

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

#Understanding #Tables #Matter

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the Truth lay beyond, inaccessible to our telescopes, accessible to the initiates. This was a long road which he was traveling with effort, wonderment, and profound joy. Physics was prose: elegant gymnastics for the mind, mirror of Creation, the key to man's dominion over the planet; but what is the stature of Creation, of man and the planet? His road was long and he had barely started up it, but I was his disciple: did I want to follow him?
-- Primo Levi

#Gymnastics #Men #Keys

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.
-- Primo Levi

#Spring #Science #Hands

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

#Animal #Air #Noble

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.
-- Primo Levi

#Men #Death Penalty #Mankind

But many, many stories were told; from what could be gathered, all fifty of the mine's inhabitants had reacted on each other, two by two, as in combinatorial analysis, that is to say, everyone with all the others, and especially every man with all the women, old maids or married, and every woman with all the men. All I had to do was to select two names at random, better if different sex, and ask a third person, "What happened with those two?" and lo and behold, a splendid story was unfolded for me, since everyone knew the story of everyone else.
-- Primo Levi

#Sex #Men #Names

Did chemistry theorems exist? No: therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. The origins of chemistry were ignoble, or at least equivocal: the dens of the alchemists, their abominable hodgepodge of ideas and language, their confessed interest in gold, their Levantine swindles typical of charlatans and magicians; instead, at the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West-Archimedes and Euclid.
-- Primo Levi

#Ideas #Alchemist #Gold

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

#Degradation #Defeat #Conclusion

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.
-- Primo Levi

#Perfection #Events

For he who loses all often easily loses himself.
-- Primo Levi

They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.
-- Primo Levi

#Pain #Men #Effort

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify...no normal human being will ever be able to identify with Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Eichmann, and endless others. This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are non-human words and deeds, really counter-human...
-- Primo Levi

#Giving #Holocaust #Deeds

We will not return 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

#Men #Evil #Skins

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

#Taken #Law #Glimpse

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

#Fate #Omission #Honest

I'm a libertine, but it's not my specialty.
-- Primo Levi

#Libertine #Specialty

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

#Children #Giving #Today

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

#Tattoo #Numbers #Holocaust

If a writer is convinced that he is honest, then it is very difficult for him to be a bad writer.
-- Primo Levi

#Honest #Difficult

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one's mind: this is a temptation one must resist. In fact, the existence of the death squads had a meaning, a message: 'We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish, and we do so wish, we can destroy not only your bodies, but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours.
-- Primo Levi

#Children #Thinking #Race

The butterfly's attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
-- Primo Levi

#Beautiful #Butterfly #Eye

To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime.
-- Primo Levi

#Heart #Brain #Kidneys

Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often loses himself.
-- Primo Levi

#Men #Clothes #Justice