Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don’t believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

53. “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

54. “No soldier outlives a thousand chances.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

55. “The most beautiful city in the world is the one where you are happy.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

56. “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

57. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

59. “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 flavor 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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

60. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

61. “The things men did or felt they had to do.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

62. “There’s something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you’re happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

63. “But I also knew that there was no going back. One can never go back; nothing and no one is ever the same. All that remained was an occasional evening of sadness, the sadness that we all feel because everything passes and because man is the only animal who knows it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

64. “Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again – words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

65. “Some day perhaps our time will be known as the age of irony. Not the witty irony of the eighteenth century, but the stupid or malignant irony of a crude age of technological progress and cultural regression.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

66. “Summer of 1918 – Never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so desirable as now; – the red poppies in the meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, dim rooms, the black mysterious trees of the twilight, the stars and the flowing waters, dreams, and long sleep – O Life, life, life!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

67. “It’s unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

69. “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. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

70. “Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

71. “Love should not be polluted with friendship.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

72. “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

73. “He looked at me sideways. “You mean, and then mixed things up a bit? Never apologise. Never talk. Send flowers. No letter. Only flowers. They cover up everything. Even graves.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

74. “You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

75. “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 as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

76. “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

77. “Katczinsky says it is all to do with education – it softens the brain.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

78. “Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

79. “I wanted to say something, but I could not. It is difficult to find words when one really has something to say. And even if one knows the right words, then one is ashamed to say them. All these words belong to other, earlier centuries. Our time has not the words yet to express its feelings. We can only be offhand – anything else rings false.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

80. “We loved our country as much as they; we went courageously into every action; but also we distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

81. “My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

82. “Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

83. “We had fancied our task would be different, only to find we were to be trained for heroism as though we were circus-ponies. But we soon accustomed ourselves to it. We learned in fact that some of these things were necessary, but the rest merely show. Soldiers have a fine nose for such distinctions.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

84. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

85. “The devil take all conventions, they were made for other times.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

86. “If we were not automata at that moment we would continue lying there, exhausted, and without will. But we are swept forward again, powerless, madly savage and raging; we will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed against us, and if we don’t destroy them, they will destroy us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

87. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

88. “Night again. We are deadened by the strain – a deadly tension that scrapes along one’s spine like a gapped knife. Our legs refuse to move, our hands tremble, our bodies are a thin skin stretched painfully over repressed madness, over an almost irresistible, bursting roar. We have neither flesh nor muscles any longer, we dare not look at one another for fear of some miscalculable thing. So we shut our teeth – it will end – it will end – perhaps we will come through.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

89. “His misfortune was that he saw a cherry tree in a garden.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

90. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

91. “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

92. “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

93. “Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

94. “In this way the squad has merely made the turn-about and a couple of paces, while the squad-leader dashes backwards and forwards like a fart on a curtain-pole.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

95. “I soon found out this much: – terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; – but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

96. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

97. “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

98. “Trommelfeuer, Sperrfeuer, Gardinenfeuer, Minen, Gas, Tanks, Maschinengewehre, Handgranaten – Worte, Worte aber sie umfassen das Grauen der Welt.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

99. “We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing – and yet half the world is in it all the same.” “But there are more lies told by the other side than by us,” say I; “just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are real culprits.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

100. “A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.”

— Erich Maria Remarque