Top 100 Erich Remarque Quotes

#1. Heaven Has No Favorites

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #777
#2. You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #35206
#3. There behind me on the stretchers my comrades are now lying and still they call. It is peace, yet they must die. But I, I am trembling with joy and am not ashamed. - And that is odd. Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers - is that the reason why wars perpetually recur? 2

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #52465
#4. Today we have done an hour's saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can't get it out of his head. "You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well," he says. Kropp

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #64726
#5. I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #87210
#6. It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #93762
#7. The sergeant major

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #102339
#8. up to the belly. When the attack starts I will let myself fall into the water, with my face as deep in the mud as I can keep it without suffocating. I must pretend to be dead. Suddenly

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #106133
#9. The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #113210
#10. For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #116551
#11. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #117656
#12. Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #133065
#13. Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #144816
#14. Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foresees
too many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #146147
#15. What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #159055
#16. Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #162403
#17. He drove the car back through the night to Paris. The hedges and orchards of Normandy flew past him. The moon hung oval and large in the misty sky. The ship was forgotten. Only the landscape remained. The landscape, the smell of hay and ripe apples, the silence and the deep peace of the inevitable

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #169944
#18. We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #170122
#19. ...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

Erich Remarque Quotes #174907
#20. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #185856
#21. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #187163
#22. No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #187657
#23. It's a primary law of this world that the old rule the young, that one must serve mine's time. It is no question of ability. Else what would become of the old dodderers who cling to power?

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #208655
#24. A woman who is desired by someone else, even a love-starved coffinmaker, immediately becomes more precious than before. Man, as it happens, lives by relative rather than absolute values.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #212607
#25. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #212701
#26. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #215684
#27. Then we change our possy and lie down again to play cards. We know how to do that: to play cards, to swear, and to fight. Not much for twenty years;
and yet too much for twenty years.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #215919
#28. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #222519
#29. Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #225895
#30. Nothing helps," she said, and smiled with an effort. "You forget it for a while - but you don't escape it.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #227635
#31. A line, a short line, stumbles off into the morning. Thirty two men.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #244025
#32. Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #248769
#33. Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #269336
#34. My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #270818
#35. I felt today when the night melted away into a flowering bush and the wind smelled of strawberries and without love one is only a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it and one might as well die

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #276860
#36. One man's destroyer is another's nightingale.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #291947
#37. Then when I am sad and understand nothing anymore, I say to myself that it's better to die while you still want to live, than to die and want to die.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #298201
#38. Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #310045
#39. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #330098
#40. Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe it!

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #330286
#41. What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #342702
#42. And be very careful at the front, Paul."
Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #351316
#43. Those are for us,' growls Detering. 'Don't talk rubbish,' Kat snaps back at him. 'You'll be lucky to get a coffin at all,' grins Tjaden, 'they'll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #357266
#44. We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #365499
#45. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #376484
#46. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #378961
#47. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #386161
#48. This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #386927
#49. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #391236
#50. From this day forth I place
dressmakers above philosophers. Those people bring beauty
into life, and that's worth a hundred times the most unfathomable meditations.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #394257
#51. Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #405500
#52. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #406555
#53. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #409996
#54. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #421603
#55. In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #431255
#56. All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings - greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #432977
#57. Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today - when it meant so little.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #437376
#58. By day Lisbon has a naive theatrical quality that enchants and captivates, but by night it is a fairy-tale city, descending over lighted terraces to the sea, like a woman in festive garments going down to meet her dark lover.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #443156
#59. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #449800
#60. Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #482833
#61. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #492603
#62. Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #493743
#63. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #498367
#64. One lost easiest what one held in one's arms - never what one left.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #505729
#65. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #507143
#66. Ravic emptied his glass. He got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket, took one out and lit it. His hands were not yet steady. He flung the match on the floor and ordered another calvados. That face, that smiling face which he thought he had just seen again - he must have been

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #508522
#67. Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #519549
#68. The invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #522263
#69. A hospital alone shows what war is.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #534066
#70. Comrade, I say to the dead man, but I say it calmly, today you tomorrow me, but if I come out of it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down; from you taken life-and from me-? Life also. I promise you, comrade. It shall never happen again

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #556258
#71. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #556825
#72. How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things seem to shine in it together.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #563610
#73. I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #568641
#74. Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #574459
#75. I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #577949
#76. I don't know what it is. I simply can't stand it. It's like a hand reaching out of the dark. It is fear - blind fear as if it were lying in wait somewhere for me.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #598545
#77. How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #604457
#78. Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #610318
#79. A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #611428
#80. The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #619664
#81. Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks - shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus - scalding, choking, death. Trenches, hospitals, the common grave - there are no other possibilities.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #621372
#82. I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #636229
#83. But that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #659169
#84. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #677086
#85. prisoners come across to us. They seem nervous and fearful, though most of them are big fellows with beards - they look like meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs. They slink about

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #682385
#86. With our young, awakened eyes, we saw that the classical conception of the fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #684464
#87. How beautiful it is when one lives completely and not with just a part of oneself. When one is full to the rim and calm because there is nothing more to get in.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #690883
#88. Extraordinary creatures you young people are, altogether. The past you hate, the present you despise, and the future is a matter of indifference. How do you suppose that can lead to any good end?

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #698356
#89. Ligh doesn't shine in the light; it shines in the dark.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #702549
#90. It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #708395
#91. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #708586
#92. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #730216
#93. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #750827
#94. The most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. - These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #756539
#95. 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

Erich Remarque Quotes #769638
#96. What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo!

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #779237
#97. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #780159
#98. I don't want to get old."
"You won't get old. Life will pass over your face, that will be all, and it will become more beautiful. One is old only when one no longer feels."
"No. When one no longer loves.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #788242
#99. The mist was like a faint perfume.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #794726
#100. Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Remarque Quotes #800686

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