How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"[M]an is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly." (1.3)
In one short, elegant sentence, Levi sums up the situation: it's human nature to use any means necessary to survive. And that's exactly what happens in the camp.
Quote #2
But the mothers stayed up to prepare the food for the journey with tender care, and washed their children and packed the luggage; and at dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him to eat today? (1.12)
The newly-captured prisoners are trying to hang onto as much a sense of normalcy and civilization as long as they possibly can even as they know that they'll likely be killed. The contrasting images of diapers and barbed wire are chilling. Diapers and barbed wire are two things that should never go together. Ever.
Quote #3
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. Our ever-insufficient knowledge of the future opposes it: and this is called, in the one instance, hope, and in the other, uncertainty of the following day. The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief. The inevitable material cares oppose it: for as they poison every lasting happiness, they equally assiduously distract us from our misfortunes and make our consciousness of them intermittent and hence supportable. (1.18)
Here's our philosophical Primo using his intellectual powers to try to come to terms with his predicament. Ironically, he finds comfort in the fact that "perfect happiness is unrealizable." That seems a bit counter-intuitive, doesn't it? But, as he goes on to explain, that means that the flip side is also true: that you can never really experience perfect, absolute, unhappiness. Even though the experiences he outlines in the book seem the definition of absolute unhappiness and misery, Primo always finds something to keep him going. The physical discomfort he suffers distracts him from the larger situation—the genocide that surrounds him.