Primo Levi Quotes

Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common ...

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real....

We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we ...

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottom...

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of be...

...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a ...

He was a physicist, more precisely an astrophysicist, diligent and eager but without illusions: the ...

For human nature is such that grief and pain - even simultaneously suffered - do not add up as a who...

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carv...

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few...

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

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

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

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

An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppressio...

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

The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to becomeerased as t...

Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghe...

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

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself ...

Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a c...

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

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

It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all ...

This is hell. Today, in our times, hell must be like this. A huge, empty room: we are tired, standin...

They are the typical product of the structure of the German Lager: if one offers a position of privi...

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fibre of man, it is a property of the huma...