Get Your Premium Membership

Primo Levi

Primo Levi Photo
Biography | All Poems | Best Poems | Short Poems | Quotes

Primo Michele Levi (Italian:  ['primo 'lvi] ; 31 July 1919 – 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books and collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz ), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi -occupied Poland ; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written.


Poems are below...



Articles

Articles about Primo Levi or articles that mention Primo Levi.

Sorry, no articles found.

More Information

Quotes

Here are a few random quotes by Primo Levi.

See also: All Primo Levi Quotes

Quote Left 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. Quote Right
Go to Quote / Comment

Quote Left 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. Quote Right
Go to Quote / Comment

Quote Left 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. Quote Right
Go to Quote / Comment

Quote Left 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. Quote Right
Go to Quote / Comment

Quote Left The aims of life are the best defense against death. Quote Right
Go to Quote / Comment


Book: Reflection on the Important Things