Erich Maria Remarque Quotes
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.
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.
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
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.
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.
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.
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
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 were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
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.
... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.
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.
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.
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
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.
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.
I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
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.
We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.
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
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.
I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
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.
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.