Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

Erich Maria Remarque
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
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
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
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
We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by.

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
The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive.

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.

Erich Maria Remarque
The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.

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

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

Erich Maria Remarque
Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.

Erich Maria Remarque
Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

Erich Maria Remarque
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
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
No, we are not related. No, we are not related. Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.

Erich Maria Remarque
Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk.

Erich Maria Remarque
A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends.

Erich Maria Remarque
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.

Erich Maria Remarque
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
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
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.

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
The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.

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