206 Quotes by Primo Levi

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

...for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.

This is the most immediate fruit of exile, of uprooting: the prevalence of the unreal over the real. Everyone dreamed past and future dreams, of slavery and redemption, of improbable paradises, of equally mythical and improbable enemies; cosmic enemies, perverse and subtle, who pervade everything like the air.

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.

[...]e questa speranza faceva parte di una ben più grande speranza, quella in un mondo diritto e giusto, miracolosamente ristabilito sulle sue naturali fondamenta dopo una eternità di stravolgimenti, di errori e di stragi, dopo il tempo della nostra lunga pazienza. Era una speranza ingenua, come tutte quelle che riposano su tagli troppo netti fra il male e il bene, fra il passato e il futuro: ma noi ne vivevamo.

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

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.

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.

in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation