Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “See what has become of us. As far as I know, only the old Greeks had gods of drinking and the joy of life: Bacchus and Dionysus. Instead of that we have Freud, inferiority complexes and the psychoanalysis. We’re afraid of the too great words in love and not afraid of much too great words in politics. A sorry generation!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

202. “But you will understand me anyways, even without words. Everything is so new to me that I cannot express it; I didn’t know that my breathe could love, that my nails could love, that even my death could love. And I don’t care how much it will last, or whether I can hold it or not, or whether I will be able to express it properly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

203. “I don’t know what it is. I simply can’t stand it. It’s like a hand reaching out of the dark. It is fear – blind fear as if it were lying in wait somewhere for me.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

204. “One lost easiest what one held in one’s arms – never what one left.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

205. “How beautiful it is when one lives completely and not with just a part of oneself. When one is full to the rim and calm because there is nothing more to get in.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

206. “An accordion player posted himself at the curb and played La Paloma. The rug peddlers appeared with silken Keshans over their shoulders. A boy sold pistachios at the tables. It looked as it had always looked – until the newspaper boys came. The papers were almost torn from their hands and a few seconds later the terrace, with all the unfolded papers, appeared as if buried under a swarm of huge, white, bloodless moths sitting on their victims greedily, with noiseless flapping wings.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

207. “Educationalists who think they can understand the young are enthusiasts. Youth does not want to be understood; it wants only to be let alone. It preserves itself immune against the insidious bacillus of being understood. The grown-up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children’s clothes. We may feel with our youth, but youth does not feel with us. That is its salvation.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

208. “Nobody taught us at school how to light a cigarette in a rainstorm, or how it is still possible to make a fire even with soaking wet wood – or that the best place to stick a bayonet is into the belly, because it can’t get jammed in there, the way it can in the ribs.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

209. “Home – what other home existed for one who belonged nowhere, but the stormy one in the heart of another for a short time? Was not this the reason why love, when it struck the hearts of the homeless, shook and possessed them so completely – because they had nothing else? Had he not for this very reason tried to avoid it? And had it not followed him and overtaken him and struck him down? It was harder to rise again on the slippery ice of a foreign land than on familiar and accustomed ground.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

210. “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

211. “The heroes of ancient Greece wept more often than our silly, sentimental modern women. They knew it did no good to hold it back. Our ideal is the impassive courage of a statue. Unnecessary. Be sad and then you’ll soon be over it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

212. “Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren’t even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn’t stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

213. “One always expects something else.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

214. “Thoughtfully I resume my patrolling to and fro between the benches. Now and again I catch a searching glance above the edge of a copy book. I stand still near the stove and look at the young faces. Most of them are good-natured and ordinary, some are sly, others stupid; but in a few there is a flicker of something brighter. For these life will not be so obvious and all things will not go so smoothly. Suddenly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

215. “He did indeed always refer to us as swine, but there was, nevertheless, a certain respect in his tone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

216. “We thought to build us houses, we desired gardens with terraces, for we wanted to look out upon the sea and to feel the wind, but we did not think that a house needs foundations. We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than the other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to plougher and ploughed.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

217. “She was very beautiful and he felt he loved her. She was not beautiful as a state or a picture is beautiful; she was beautiful as a meadow across which the wind blows. It was life that pulsed in her and that had formed her into what she was.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

218. “A neat little apartment with a neat little bourgeois life. A neat little security on the edge of the abyss. Do you really see that?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

219. “I knew that the late Zalewski, rest his soul, despite his motto, literally drank himself to death. His wife had on other occasions told me so often enough. But that didn’t worry her. She used her husband as other folk do the Bible – for quotations. And the longer he was dead the harder she worked him. He now had something for all occasions – just like the Bible.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

220. “She had no country, Ravic thought. But she did not need one either. She was at home on all ships. She was at home wherever there was courage and conflict and even defeat if it was without despair. She was not only the goddess of victory, she was also the goddess of all adventurers and the goddess of refugees – so long as they did not give up.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

221. “You see,” said Otto. “That’s the gift of age. Tears and laughter – quick changes. No resentments. Something one might well learn,” he observed meditatively.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

222. “The State, that immune betrayer, which embezzles billions and jails anyone who defrauds it of as much as five marks, would find some pretext for not paying.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

223. “Ravic knew the danger; he knew whither he was going and he also knew that tomorrow he would resist again – but suddenly in this night, in this hour of his return from a lost Ararat into the blood-smell of coming destruction, everything became nameless. Danger was danger and not danger; fate was at the same time a sacrifice and the deity to whom one sacrificed. And tomorrow was an unknown world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

224. “As usual in times of war, fear, and affliction, the individual human being had ceased to exist; only one thing counted: a valid passport.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

225. “What’s going on outside, Ravic?” “Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it’s doing.” “Will there be war?” “Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle.” Ravic smiled. “Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

226. “The car ran almost noiselessly. It ran as if gravity had no power over it. Houses glided past, churches, villages, the golden spots of the estaminets and bistros, a gleaming river, a mill, and then again the even contour of the plain, the sky arching above it like the inside of a huge shell in whose milky nacre shimmered the pearl of the moon.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

227. “My healthy blood was powerless to cure the sick blood of my beloved. That was beyond understanding. And so is death.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

228. “Between five and ten recruits fall to every old hand.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

229. “We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me “dear boy,” it means much more than when another uses it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

230. “It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

231. “He pointed to the sky in which Mars twinkled above the darkening roofs, large and red. “Yes, and they say that that fellow up there is closer to our earth than he has been for many years.” He laughed. “Soon we’ll read that somewhere a child has been born with a mole like a sword. And that it was raining blood somewhere else. The only thing missing now is the enigmatic comet of the Middle Ages to make all the ominous signs complete.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

232. “The simplest and the most incredible thing in the world had come true again: two people speaking to each other, each for himself; and sounds, called words, shaped the same images and feelings in that palpitating mass behind the skull, and out of meaningless vibrations of the vocal chords and their unexplainable reactions in the viscous gray convolutions, skies suddenly grew again in which were mirrored clouds, brooks, past times, growth and decay and hard-won wisdom.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

233. “But is the primary law of this world, where the old rule the young, that one must serve one’s time. It is no question of ability. Else what would become of old dodderers who cling to their power?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

234. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

235. “And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the crowding apparitions, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support, how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. 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

236. “Cans. We don’t have to think anymore. Everything is premeditated, pre-chewed, pre-felt. Cans. All you have to do is open them. Delivered to your home three times a day. Nothing any more to cultivate yourself, or let grow and boil on the fire of questions, of doubt, and of desire. Cans.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

237. “I implore them with my eyes: Speak to me – take me up – take me, Life of my Youth – you who are care-free, beautiful – receive me again – I wait, I wait. Images float through my mind, but they do not grip me, they are mere shadows and memories. Nothing – nothing –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

238. “When you wake up it is spring and when you go to sleep it is fall and a thousand times in between it is winter and summer, and when we love each other enough we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind, and that is much.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

239. “Not everyone’s life is like a house that belongs to him and that he can go on decorating ever more richly with the furniture of his memory. Some people live in hotels, in many hotels. The years close behind them like hotel doors – and the only thing that remains is a little courage and no regrets.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

240. “But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him, he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my thoughts.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

241. “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.” “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden. “Not you, nor anybody else here.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

242. “It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” – Paul Baumer.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

243. “How shabby the truth can become when one articulates it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

244. “To-day we would pass through the scenes of our youth like travellers. We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled – we are indifferent.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

245. “But our comrades are dead, we cannot help them, they have their rest – and who knows what is waiting for us? We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

246. “Paris is a city where time is best to spend by doing nothing.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

247. “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

248. “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

249. “Hard... What does he mean by hard? And am I like that? Or is it only that I have no time for the fraud of so-called good manners, which strews a little glitter over black truths, and thinks that that has made them disappear.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

250. “I think it is more of a kind of fever,” says Albert. “No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing – and yet half the world is in it all the same.”

— Erich Maria Remarque