Home › Authors › Primo Levi
Primo Levi Quotes
1919–1987 Italy
Primo Levi (31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian chemist and author of memoirs, short stories, poems and novels. He joined an anti-Fascist group at the start of the Second World War but was captured and taken to the German concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Italy Chemists Essayists Memoirists Non-fiction authors Also known as: If This Is a Man, Other People's Trades, The Drowned and the Saved, The Periodic Table, The Wrench
Random Primo Levi quote
31 quotes
I could tell innumerable other stories and they would all be true: all literally true, in the nature of the transitions, in their order and data. The number of atoms is so great that one could always be found whose story coincides with any capriciously invented story.
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.
The Drowned and the Saved (1986)
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."
If This Is a Man (1947)
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.
The Wrench (1978)
It is a pretty structure isn’t it? It makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in chemistry as in architecture that “beautiful” edifices, that is, symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy: in short, the same thing happens with molecules as with the cupolas of cathedrals of the arches of bridges.
The Periodic Table (1975)
Beware of analogies: for millenia they corrupted medicine, and it may be their fault that today's pedagogical systems are so numerous, and after three thousand years of argument we still don't know which is best.
The Wrench (1978)
The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one’s country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.
The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.
I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.
And we must remember that [Hitler and Mussolini's] faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men. 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.
Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Collected Poems (1984)
Topics Primo Levi is quoted on
Works