Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

2. “Heaven Has No Favorites.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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3. “Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

4. “A hospital alone shows what war is.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

5. “I want to think and at the same time that’s the last thing in the world I want to do.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

7. “It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

10. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

12. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

14. “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

15. “The war has ruined us for everything.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

16. “No one could become stranger than the person you once loved.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

17. “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

18. “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

19. “Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today – when it meant so little.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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23. “Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

24. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

29. “Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

30. “It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent – and their silence is precisely what disturbs me.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

31. “It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

32. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

33. “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

34. “Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

36. “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

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37. “One is never too young. Only always too old.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

38. “When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

39. “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

40. “We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

41. “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

42. “At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn’t get jammed, as it does in the ribs.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

44. “A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then for years together that very crime on which formerly the world’s condemnation and severest penalty fall, becomes our highest aim.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

47. “What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

48. “Trenches, hospitals, the common grave – there are no other possibilities.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

49. “Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

50. “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