Top 100 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
#2. Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free.
Erich Maria Remarque
#5. Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
Erich Maria Remarque
#6. ...but a sense of strangeness will not leave me. I cannot feel at home among these things. There is my mother, there is my sister, there my case of butterflies, and there the mahogony piano, but I am not myself there. There is a distance, a veil between us.
Erich Maria Remarque
#7. He's afraid," Graber said.
"Yes, naturally. But he's a good dog."
"And a man-eater."
"We're all that."
"Why?"
"We are. And we think, just like that dog, that we are still good. And just like him we are looking for a bit of warmth and light and friendship.
Erich Maria Remarque
#8. Once more, dully menacing, comes the noise of gunfire, and already from afar, like the bill of a woodpecker, sounds the knock-knocking of a machine gun. We grow calm and are almost glad to hear again the familiar, trusty noises of death.
Erich Maria Remarque
#9. The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us: - against whom, against whom?
Erich Maria Remarque
#10. Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts - it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung - a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice.
Erich Maria Remarque
#12. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
#13. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?
Erich Maria Remarque
#15. But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.
Erich Maria Remarque
#16. Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.
Erich Maria Remarque
#17. I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
Erich Maria Remarque
#18. Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned.
Erich Maria Remarque
#19. Keep things at arm's length ... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.
Erich Maria Remarque
#20. She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was.
Erich Maria Remarque
#21. Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today - when it meant so little.
Erich Maria Remarque
#22. I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it shows through blue-black like poison.
Erich Maria Remarque
#24. It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.
Erich Maria Remarque
#26. We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
Erich Maria Remarque
#27. We are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and often are all but extinguished.
Erich Maria Remarque
#28. Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#29. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#33. But that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Erich Maria Remarque
#34. Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;
when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.
Erich Maria Remarque
#35. Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again - words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!
Erich Maria Remarque
#36. Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.
Erich Maria Remarque
#37. We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out ... we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night ... and thus we wait for morning.
Erich Maria Remarque
#38. We live in rooms too much, I say. We think too much in rooms. We make love too much in rooms. We despair too much in rooms. Can you despair in the open?
Erich Maria Remarque
#41. We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.
Erich Maria Remarque
#42. For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress
to the future.
Erich Maria Remarque
#44. You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.
Erich Maria Remarque
#45. That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years.
Erich Maria Remarque
#46. The later it gets the more disturbed the city becomes. I go with Albert through the streets. Men are standing in groups at every corner. Rumours are flying. It is said that the military have already fired on a procession of demonstrating workers.
Erich Maria Remarque
#47. People should die, only when they're alone. Or when they hate - not when they love.
Erich Maria Remarque
#50. The screaming of the beasts becomes louder. One can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth it rolls on immeasurably.
Erich Maria Remarque
#51. I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.
Erich Maria Remarque
#52. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.
Erich Maria Remarque
#53. Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.
Erich Maria Remarque
#54. Here where you stand, a young Etruscan woman stood in just the same way three thousand years ago - and the wind came in just this way from Africa and chased the light across the ocean.
Erich Maria Remarque
#55. Our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life
Erich Maria Remarque
#56. Do you know how one knows a cavalier when one sees him? He always behaves decently when he is drunk.
Erich Maria Remarque
#57. Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.
But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.
Erich Maria Remarque
#58. We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.
Erich Maria Remarque
#60. I thought nothing; I didn't even despair; I was just stupefied and grey and dead.
Erich Maria Remarque
#61. And without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die.
Erich Maria Remarque
#62. I soon found out this much:
terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;
but it kills, if a man thinks about it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#64. Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3
Erich Maria Remarque
#65. He did indeed always refer to us as swine, but there was, nevertheless, a certain respect in his tone.
Erich Maria Remarque
#66. He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life.
Erich Maria Remarque
#67. With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.
Erich Maria Remarque
#69. I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;
I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life ... I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
Erich Maria Remarque
#71. You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal - no one will see it. But when a button is missing - everyone sees that.
Erich Maria Remarque
#72. We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man.
Erich Maria Remarque
#73. On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.
Erich Maria Remarque
#74. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Erich Maria Remarque
#75. The facts of life are simple and trivial. Only our imagination gives life to them. It makes the laundry pole of facts a flagstaff of dreams.
Erich Maria Remarque
#76. The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot.
Erich Maria Remarque
#77. It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
#78. We are not, indeed, in the front-line, but only in the reserves, yet in every face can be read: This is the front, now we are within its embrace.
Erich Maria Remarque
#79. My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
Erich Maria Remarque
#80. Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
Erich Maria Remarque
#81. I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.
Erich Maria Remarque
#82. A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
#83. Clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting.
Erich Maria Remarque
#84. Before my mother's tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.
Erich Maria Remarque
#86. A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?
Erich Maria Remarque
#87. It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.
Erich Maria Remarque
#88. Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.
Erich Maria Remarque
#89. ALREADY KNOW the camp on the moors. It was here that Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education. But now I know hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered. There are only a few people that I have occasionally met before. I go through the routine mechanically. In the evenings I generally
Erich Maria Remarque
#90. Not everyone's life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors - and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.
Erich Maria Remarque
#91. At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.
Erich Maria Remarque
#92. When it is fairly quiet we can hear the transports behind the enemy lines rolling ceaselessly until dawn. Kat says that they do not go back but are bringing up troops - troops, munitions, and guns.
Erich Maria Remarque
#96. But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.
Erich Maria Remarque
#97. Our life alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely
Erich Maria Remarque
#98. Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.
Erich Maria Remarque
#99. Don't ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you'll never do it.
Erich Maria Remarque
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