Quotes by Primo Levi

About Primo Levi:

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Primo Levi

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

They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly b...

Primo Levi

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restraint, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from ...

Primo Levi

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

Primo Levi

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...

Primo Levi

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. So we must certainly wash o...

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 enemi...

Primo Levi

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.

Primo Levi

The sea of grief has no shores, no bottom; no one can sound its depths.

Primo Levi

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

...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state. To this...

Primo Levi

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

Primo Levi

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

Primo Levi

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

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

For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of s...

Primo Levi

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

Primo Levi

Un recuerdo evocado demasiado a menudo y expresado en forma de historia tiende a convertirse en un estereotipo... cristalizado, perfeccionado, adornado, instalándose en sí mismo en lugar de la memoria pura y dura, y creciendo a sus expensas.

Primo Levi

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, an...

Primo Levi

Author Bio

  • NamePrimo Levi
  • DescriptionItalian chemist, memoirist, short story writer, novelist, essayist
  • BornJuly 31, 1919
  • DiedApril 11, 1987
  • CountryItaly
  • ProfessionChemist; Poet; Politician; Writer; Novelist
  • WorksIf This Is A Man
  • AwardsStrega Prize