Erich Maria Remarque quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Erich Maria Remarque on Wise Famous Quotes.

One lost easiest what one held in one's arms - never what one left.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot.

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.

Going away is not always so simple - when one takes oneself along.

Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

State and home country, there's a difference

There is no guilt in feelings ever.

How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.

A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand.

That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The subject

One man's destroyer is another's nightingale.

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.

No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

Don't ask about the consequences if you want to do something. Otherwise you'll never do it.

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.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

Heaven Has No Favorites

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.

The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.

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.

No one could become stranger than the person you once loved

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?

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!

You can deceive yourself with truth too. That's an even more dangerous dream.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

Our heads were full of nebulous ideas, which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life

Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.

A man is courageous
only when he is also afraid.

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.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing.

But that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.

People should die, only when they're alone. Or when they hate - not when they love.

-You don't like to talk about yourself, do you?
-I don't even like to think about myself.

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.

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

serenity, the calm daughter of tolerance

The sergeant major

I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it. Before

I thought nothing; I didn't even despair; I was just stupefied and grey and dead.

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

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.

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.

The mist was like a faint perfume.

Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.

So I thought. Are you happy?"
"What's that?"
"Don't you know yet? But who really knows what it is? Dancing on the head of a pin, maybe.

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.

One is never too young. Only always too old.

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.

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.

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.

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.

What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo!

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.

We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.

I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.

Well, she can go to hell with her whispering and her words. You believe in a miracle, but really it just comes down to loaves of bread.

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

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.

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

A line, a short line, stumbles off into the morning. Thirty two men.

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.

Do you know how one knows a cavalier when one sees him? He always behaves decently when he is drunk.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.

-Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it...

Ligh doesn't shine in the light; it shines in the dark.

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I

We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.

Love should not be polluted with friendship.

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

The invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory.

Children, that's what a man needs - children, who know nothing about it.

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.

A man has to have something he can put faith in.

What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep all away.

Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

I stand there and wonder whether, when I am twenty, I shall have experienced the bewildering emotions of love.

One always expects something else.

What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?

There was too little solid ground under one's feet.

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.