Maria Remarque Quotes

One lost easiest what one held in one's arms - never what one left. — Erich Maria Remarque

Our knowledge of life is limited to death — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

Going away is not always so simple - when one takes oneself along. — Erich Maria Remarque

State and home country, there's a difference — Erich Maria Remarque

There is no guilt in feelings ever. — Erich Maria Remarque

The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it — Erich Maria Remarque

How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied and rather mysteriously: Revenge is black-pudding. — Erich Maria Remarque

A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

One man's destroyer is another's nightingale. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

Anything you can settle with money is cheap. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming. — Erich Maria Remarque

The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be. — Erich Maria Remarque

No one could become stranger than the person you once loved — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

Clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

The invisible storehouse in nothingness, called memory. — Erich Maria Remarque

Love should not be polluted with friendship. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I — Erich Maria Remarque

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

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel! — Erich Maria Remarque

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

A man has to have something he can put faith in. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A man is courageous
only when he is also afraid. — Erich Maria Remarque

It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid. — Erich Maria Remarque

When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

There had never been any more between us than
chance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtedness
and binds closer than much else — Erich Maria Remarque

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction. — Erich Maria Remarque

A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone. — Erich Maria Remarque

-Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it... — Erich Maria Remarque

Ligh doesn't shine in the light; it shines in the dark. — Erich Maria Remarque

We have so much to say, and we shall never say it. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

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

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

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

Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

A line, a short line, stumbles off into the morning. Thirty two men. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

A hospital alone shows what war is. — Erich Maria Remarque

We developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced - comradeship in arms. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

One always expects something else. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

There was too little solid ground under one's feet. — Erich Maria Remarque

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth. — Erich Maria Remarque

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

He did indeed always refer to us as swine, but there was, nevertheless, a certain respect in his tone. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

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

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

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love! — Erich Maria Remarque