Top 100 Primo Levi Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.”

— Primo Levi

3. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”

— Primo Levi

4. “I am constantly amazed by man’s inhumanity to man.”

— Primo Levi

5. “The aims of life are the best defense against death.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

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7. “The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows and occasionally the chance to feel strong.”

— Primo Levi

8. “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

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

— Primo Levi

10. “Those who deny Auschwitz would be ready to remake it.”

— Primo Levi

11. “On the contrary, I believe it doesn’t make much sense to say that one man is worth more than another. One man can be stronger than another but less wise. Or more educated but not so brave. Or more generous but also more stupid. So his value depends on what you want from him; a man can be very good at his job, and worthless if you set him to do some other job.”

— Primo Levi

12. “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

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

— Primo Levi

14. “We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still posses one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.”

— Primo Levi

15. “I’m a libertine, but it’s not my specialty.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Ik kan niet begrijpen, niet verdragen dat men een mens beoordeelt niet naar wat hij is, maar naar de groep waar hij toevallig toe behoort.”

— Primo Levi

21. “Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.”

— Primo Levi

22. “The living are more demanding; the dead can wait.”

— Primo Levi

23. “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

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

— Primo Levi

25. “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

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

— Primo Levi

27. “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

28. “He could hardly read or write but his heart spoke the language of the good.”

— Primo Levi

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.”

— Primo Levi

33. “Dissention, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you are not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, but you are not.”

— Primo Levi

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we ill have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”

— 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. “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

40. “For a few hours we can be unhappy in the manner of free men.”

— Primo Levi

41. “I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.”

— Primo Levi

42. “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

43. “Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

45. “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

46. “For good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.”

— Primo Levi

47. “For he who loses all often easily loses himself.”

— Primo Levi

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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