Primo Levi quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Primo Levi

Primo Levi Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Primo Levi on Wise Famous Quotes.

If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.

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 ...

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

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

Perhaps memory is like a bucket; if you want to cram into it more fruit than it will hold, the fruit is crushed.

Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment ...

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

Does not ingenuity consist in the finding or creating of connections between apparently extraneous orders of ideas?)

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.

There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.

The latrine is an oasis of peace.

Until one day there will be no more sense in saying: tomorrow.

How can one hit a man without anger?

Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need.

Fear is supremely contagious, and its immediate reaction is to make one try to run away.

We become aware, with amazement, that we have forgotten nothing, every memory evoked rises in front of us painfully clear.

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

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

In the space of a few minutes the sky turned black and it began to rain.

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

There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect.

She had asked the older women: "What is that fire?" And they had replied: "It is we who are burning.

He never asked nor accepted any reward, because he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward.

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?

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.

The aims of life are the best defense against death.

I do not know what I will think tomorrow and later; today I feel no distinct emotion.

Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.

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

The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi's writing.

For he who loses all often easily loses himself.

... in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.

(this is a story interwoven with freezing dawns.)

Real problems sooner or later are resolved; on the contrary, pseudoproblems are not.

Today, I think that if for no other reason than that an Auschwitz existed, no one in our age should speak of Providence.

The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.

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.

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

A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn't he?

What do you take me for? Do you think I was born yesterday? Do you think I have never dealt in eggs?

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

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

Each of us bears the imprint of a friend met along the way; In each the trace of each.

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

Perhaps Kafka laughed when he told stories [ ... ] because one isn't always equal to oneself.

If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.

The truck went on its way in the night and Gedaleh shouted, laughing, If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

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

Since it is difficult to distinguish true prophets from false, it is as well to regard all prophets with suspicion

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

If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? If not now, when?

Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.