Primo Levi Quotes

I am everything and I am nothing. I am just kidding; I am not everything and nothing. That would be ridiculous. I am just everything.

Well, life is dark, isn't it? Mostly, it's dreadful. At the same time, death is funny too. I mean, look at the fuss we make of it.

So I got home, and the phone was ringing. I picked it up, and said 'Who's speaking please?' And a voice said 'You are.'

Life itself is pretty funny when you realize how absurd it can be.

I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.

I look in the mirror, and what I see is someone who has never grown up - a crashing sentimentalist who alternates between great heights and black depths.

I guess what I always found funny was the human condition.

From my point of view, humour and irony include tragedy; they're two sides of the same coin.

We are proud of our ridiculousness. That's what made our Surrealism. Proud and ashamed of everything at the same time. I think that's my definition of Belgium.

That's what sort of fascinates me - what's funny as well as what's sad.

Any tragic memory I have I also think is really funny. On any given day, I can think about how horrible something is and also how ridiculous and over-the-top it is.

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.

I saw something even more beautiful than a sense of humor: an appreciation for life’s essential absurdity.

I hate taking myself seriously. It drives me crazy!

The human being taken in his profound reality as well as in his great tension of becoming is a divided being, a being which divides again, having permitted himself the illusion of unity for barely an instant. He divides and then reunites.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

The devil is not, indeed, perfectly humorous, but that is only because he is the extreme of all humor.

America is such a paradoxical society, hypocritically paradoxical, that if you don't have some humor, you'll crack up.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

As a model, I really stand for not being a model, if that makes sense.

Wit is the clash and reconcilement of incongruities; the meeting of extremes round a corner.

My other car is a vehicle with a bumper sticker describing this car.

If you had chicken at lunch and chicken at dinner, do you ever wonder if the two chickens knew each other?

He was dead. However, his nose throbbed painfully, which he thought odd in the circumstances.

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.