Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Erich Maria Remarque

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.

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.

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.

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us.

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

Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free.

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.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.

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.

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.

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.

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

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

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.

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

Heaven Has No Favorites

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

Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.

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

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

In any case, the bayonet isn't as important as it used to be. It's more usual now to go into the attack with hand-grenades and your entrenching tool. The sharpened spade is a lighter and more versatile weapon - not only can you get a man under the chin, but more to the point, you can strike a blow with a lot more force behind it. That's especially true if you can bring it down diagonally between the neck and the shoulder, because then you can split down as far as the chest. When you put a bayonet in, it can stick, and you have to give the other man a hefty kick in the guts to get it out.

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.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

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.

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.

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.

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

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.

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

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

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

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.

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

I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing.

The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair.

The things men did or felt they had to do.

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

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

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.

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

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.

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.

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

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

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

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.

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

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

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

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.

Every little bean must be heard as well as seen!

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.

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.

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

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

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

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

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