Erich Maria Remarque > Quotes

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

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

“It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war."
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“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?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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

“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, Three Comrades

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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, Three Comrades

“Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me."
-All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life — and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, Three Comrades

“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, Three Comrades

“We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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

“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

“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.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“The things men did or felt they had to do.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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

“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, Three Comrades

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“- Смятате, че не си подхождаме? Правилно. Ала хората, които са родени един за друг, по-лесно могат да се разделят. Също като тенджерата и похлупака, направени по мярка - те се отделят без трудност. Но ако капакът не отговаря на тенджерата и трябва да се набие с чук в нея, то при опит да ги отделиш - много лесно нещо може да се счупи.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Shadows in Paradise

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“There was only the broad square with the scattered dim moons of the street lamps and with the monumental stone arch which receded into the mist as though it would prop up the melancholy sky and protect beneath itself the faint lonely flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which looked like the last grave of mankind in the midst of night and loneliness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“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, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Haven't you ever observed how we live in an age of self-persecution? What a lot of things there are one might do that one doesn't - and yet why, God only knows. Work has become so tremendously important to-day, because so many have none, I suppose, that it kills everything else... Work, work, work . . . an abominable obsession - and always under the illusion it will be different later. And it never is different. Queer, isn't it, that anyone should do that with his life?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Three Comrades

“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, Three Comrades

“Разум дан человеку, чтобы он понял: жить одним разумом нельзя.”
― Erich Maria Remarque

“Кто хочет удержать - тот теряет. Кто готов с улыбкой отпустить - того стараются удержать.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Heaven Has No Favorites

“(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, Arch of Triumph