206 Quotes by Primo Levi

Compassion and brutality can coexist in the same individual and in the same moment...

I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man.

It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity.

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 unobtainable . . . Our ever-sufficient knowledge of the future opposes it and this is called in the one instance: hope.

Viajámos até aqui nos vagões selados; vimos partir em direcção ao nada as nossas mulheres e as nossas crianças; reduzidos a escravos, marchamos mil vezes para trás e para diante, numa fadiga muda, já apagados nas almas antes da morte anónima. Não temos regresso. Ninguém deve sair daqui, pois poderia levar para o mundo, juntamente com a marca gravada na carne, a terrível notícia do que, em Auschwitz, o homem teve coragem de fazer ao homem.

[...]poi scese una notte totale, atrocemente gelida, senza luci in cielo né in terra.

Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.

Nostalgia is a fragile and tender anguish, basically different, more intimate, more human than the other pains we had endured till then [...] Nostalgia is a limpid and clean pain, but demanding; it permeates every minute of the day, permits no other thoughts and induces a need for escape.

We had felt no joy in seeing Viena undone and the Germans broken, but rather anguish. Not compassion, but a larger anguish, which was mixed up with our own misery, with the heavy threatening sensation of an irreparable and definitive evil, which was present everywhere. Nestling like gangrene in the guts of Europe and the world. The seed of future harm.