Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Primo Levi (Italian Novelist, Poet)

Primo Levi (1919–87) was an Italian-Jewish writer and chemist. He is best known for his restrained and moving autobiographical account of and reflections on survival in the Nazi concentration camps.

Born of Jewish parents in Turin, Levi enrolled at Turin University to study chemistry. As he wrote in Il sistema periodico (1984; The Periodic Table, 1984,) he believed that “the nobility of Man … lay in making himself the conqueror of matter.” During World War II, he fled into the mountains and tried to help set up a small guerrilla force, but this ‘deluge of outcasts’ was accidentally discovered. In December 1943, Levi was arrested, turned over to the Schutzstaffel, and dispatched to Auschwitz.

Levi’s ten months in Auschwitz haunted him for the rest of his life and may have prompted his suicide. Levi never removed the number tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz; it was engraved on his headstone.

Levi’s first book was Se questo è un uomo (1947; If This is a Man, 1959,) a vivid account of life in a concentration camp written with a chemist’s detached sensibility. He continued to combine his career as a chemist with that of a writer. His best-known book is Il sistema periodico, a collection of 21 meditations and autobiographical reflections, each named for a chemical element, on the analogies between the physical, chemical, and moral spheres.

Levi was one of the 20th century’s most incisive commentators, and his other titles include the novels La chiave a stella (1978; The Wrench, 1987) and Se non ora, quando? (1982; If Not Now, When?, 1985) and the collection of essays L’altrui mestiere (1985; Other People’s Trades, 1985.)

The Complete Works of Primo Levi (2015) contains English translations of his entire oeuvre, including pieces never previously available to Anglophone readers.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Primo Levi

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. To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
—Primo Levi
Topics: Stupidity

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.
—Primo Levi

The aims of life are the best defense against death.
—Primo Levi
Topics: Purpose, Defense

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
Topics: Home

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: “I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.”
—Primo Levi
Topics: Science, Chemistry

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.
—Primo Levi
Topics: Professionalism

A country is considered the more civilized the more wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
—Primo Levi
Topics: Law

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light. The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.
—Primo Levi

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.
—Primo Levi
Topics: Scientists, Science

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.
—Primo Levi

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
Topics: Gossip

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
Topics: Memory

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