Top 100 Primo Levi Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “But here in the Lager there are no criminals nor madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.”

— Primo Levi

53. “I will tell just one more story... and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

55. “Man’s capacity to dig himself in, to secrete a shell, to build around himself a tenuous barrier of defence, even in apparently desperate circumstances, is astonishing and merits a serious study.”

— Primo Levi

56. “He understood before any of us that this life is war; he permitted himself no indulgences, he lost no time complaining or commiserating with himself and with others, but entered the battle from the beginning.”

— Primo Levi

57. “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

58. “The latrine is an oasis of peace.”

— Primo Levi

59. “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?”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

61. “Suicide is an act of man and not of the animal.”

— Primo Levi

62. “An extreme case of the distortion of the memory of a committed guilty act is found in its suppression. Here, too, the borderline between good and bad faith can be vague; behind the “I don’t know” and “I do not remember” that one hears in courtrooms there is sometimes the precise intent to lie, but at other times it is a fossilized lie, rigidified in a formula.”

— Primo Levi

63. “Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him alive again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not the sort of person you can tell stories about, nor to whom one erects monuments – he who laughed at monuments: he lived completely in his deeds, and when they were over nothing of him remains – nothing but words, precisely.”

— Primo Levi

64. “The triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction glows virtually everywhere in Levi’s writing.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

67. “Alongside the liberating relief of the veteran who tells us his story, I now felt in the writing a complex, intense, and new pleasure, similar to that I felt as a student when penetrating the solemn order of differentials calculus. It was exalting to search and find, or create, the right word, that is, commensurate, concise, and strong; to dredge up events from my memory and describe them with the greatest rigor and the least clutter.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

69. “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.”

— Primo Levi

70. “She lived with the doctor on Via Po, in a gloomy, dark apartment, barely warmed in winter by just a small Franklin stove, and she no longer threw out anything, because everything might eventually come in handy: not even the cheese rinds or the foil on chocolates, with which she made silver balls to be sent to missions to “free a little black boy.”

— Primo Levi

71. “He was a bricklayer; for fifty years, in Italy, America, France, then again in Italy, and finally in Germany, he had laid bricks, and every brick had been cemented with curses. He cursed continuously, but not mechanically; he cursed with method and care, acrimoniously, pausing to find the right word, frequently correcting himself and losing his temper when unable to find the word he wanted; then he cursed the curse that would not come.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

73. “We the survivors are not the true witnesses. The true witnesses, those in possession of the unspeakable truth are the drowned, the dead, the disappeared.”

— Primo Levi

74. “Non c’e’ ove specchiarsi, ma il nostro aspetto ci sta dinnanzi, riflesso in cento visi lividi, in cento pupazzi miserabili e sordidi. Eccoci trasformati nei fantasmi intravisti ieri sera.”

— Primo Levi

75. “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

76. “We travelled here in the sealed wagons; we saw our women and our children leave towards nothingness; we, transformed into slaves, have marched a hundred times backwards and forwards to our silent labors, killed in our spirit long before our anonymous death. 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

77. “If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today?”

— Primo Levi

78. “A man who would mutilate himself is well damned, isn’t he?”

— Primo Levi

79. “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 and nothing continues to happen.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

81. “It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy.”

— Primo Levi

82. “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

83. “Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?”

— Primo Levi

84. “Alas for the dreamer : the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings. But it does not often happen to us, and they are not long dreams. We are only tired beasts.”

— Primo Levi

85. “One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand.”

— Primo Levi

86. “Pensavo molte cose insensate, e non pensavo alcune cose tristemente sensate.”

— Primo Levi

87. “Today the only thing left of the life of those days is what one needs to suffer hunger and cold; I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself.”

— Primo Levi

88. “Quien quema libros termina tarde o temprano por quemar hombres – Heinrich Heine.”

— Primo Levi

89. “Strano, in qualche modo si ha sempre l’impressione di essere fortunati, che una qualche circostanza, magari infinitesima, ci trattenga sull’orlo della disperazione e ci conceda di vivere.”

— Primo Levi

90. “The tunes are few, a dozen, the same ones every day, morning and evening : marches to popular songs dear to every German. They lie engraved on our minds and will be the last thing in Lager that we shall forget : they are the voice of the Lager, the perceptible expression of its geometrical madness, of the resolution of others to annihilate us first as men in order to kill us more slowly afterwards.”

— Primo Levi

91. “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

92. “Alas for the dreamer: the moment of consciousness that accompanies the awakening is the acutest of sufferings.”

— Primo Levi

93. “Qualcuno, molto tempo fa, ha scritto che anche i libri, come gli esseri umani, hanno un loro destino, imprevedibile, diverso da quello che per loro si desiderava e si attendeva.”

— Primo Levi

94. “From all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, I have always left with a slight taste of defeat; of also having been, somehow inadvertently, not a man to him, but an instrument in his hands.”

— Primo Levi

95. “Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.”

— Primo Levi

96. “There are few men who know how to go to their deaths with dignity, and often they are not those whom one would expect. Few know how to remain silent and respect the silence of others.”

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

98. “Finally, and fundamentally, didn’t he, who was honest and open, smell the foul odor of Fascist truths that were polluting the sky, didn’t he find it disgraceful that a thinking man should be asked to believe without thinking? Didn’t he feel disgust for all the dogmas, all the unproved declarations, all the imperatives.”

— Primo Levi

99. “Nessuno ebbe animo di venire a vedere che cosa fanno gli uomini quando sanno di dover morire.”

— Primo Levi

100. “Het lijkt me overbodig hieraan toe te voegen dat geen enkel feit verzonnen is.”

— Primo Levi