It is man who kills, man who creates or suffers injustice; it is no longer man who, having lost all restrained, shares his bed with a corpse. Whoever waits for his neighbor to die in order to take his piece of bread is, albeit guiltless, further from the model of thinking man than the most primitive pygmy or the most vicious sadist".

— Primo Levi

I, too, entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.

— Primo Levi

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.

— Primo Levi

Monsters exist, but they are too few to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

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

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who stop to consider the antithesis; that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

— Primo Levi

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

— Primo Levi

That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquered of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed does in lice; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishment vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.

— Primo Levi

The conviction that life has a purpose is rooted in every fiber of man, it is a property of the human substance. Free men give many names to this purpose, and think and talk a lot about its nature. But for us the question is simpler. Today, in this place, our only purpose is to reach the spring. At the moment we care about nothing else. Behind this aim there is not at the moment any other aim. In the morning while we wait endlessly lined up in roll-call square for the time to leave for work, while every breath of wind penetrates our clothes and runs in violent shivers over our defenceless bodies, and everything is gray around us, and we are gray; in the morning, when it is still dark, we all look at the sky in the east to spot the first signs of a milder season, and the rising of the sun is commented on every day: today a little earlier than yesterday, today a little warmer than yesterday, in two months, in a month, the cold will call a truce, and we will have one enemy less. Today the sun rose bright and clear for the first time from the horizon of mud. It is a Polish sun, cold, white, distant, and only warms the skin, but when it dissolved the last mists a murmur ran through our colorless numbers, and when even I felt its lukewarm through my clothes I understood how men can worship the sun.

— Primo Levi