Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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 – now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

252. “It makes very little difference where one lives, Kate. Some places are more comfortable than others, but it is never important. The only important thing is what one makes of it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

253. “After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us that a braided postman should have more authority over us than had formerly our parents, our teachers, and the whole gamut of culture from Plato to Goethe.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

254. “With our young, awakened eyes, we saw that the classical conception of the fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

255. “Kat looks around and whispers: “Shouldn’t we just take a revolver and put an end to it?” The youngster will hardly survive the carrying, and at the most he will only last a few days. What he has gone through so far is nothing to what he’s in for till he dies. Now he is numb and feels nothing. In an hour he will become one screaming bundle of intolerable pain. Every day that he can live will be a howling torture. And to whom does it matter whether he has them or not – – I nod.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

256. “We sit as if in our graves waiting only to be closed in.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

257. “But Tjaden is quite fascinated. His otherwise prosy fancy is blowing bubbles. ‘But look,’ he announces, ‘I simply can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the latrine the same as I have.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

258. “The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each of them that was flung up saved one of us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

259. “Die Worte wehten im Zwielicht hin und her, sie waren ohne Bedeutung, und das, was von Bedeutung war, war ohne Worte.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

260. “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. We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

261. “That is Franz Kemmerich, nineteen and a half years old, he doesn’t want to die. Let him not die!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

262. “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 among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

263. “Peace, a fireplace, books, silence... Before this was seen as one philistinism. Now these are dreams of a lost paradise.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

264. “Still the little piece of convulsed earth in which we lie is held. We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

265. “The scene struck me as typical of the sinister, demonic mob spirit of our times, of all the frightened, hysterical crowds who follow slogans. It makes no difference whether the slogans come from the right or the left, as long as they relieve the masses of the hard work of thinking and of the need to take responsibility.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

266. “And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

267. “There’s something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you are happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary. Happiness is a question of degree. When you know that, you are seldom completely unhappy.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

268. “There are many such stories, they are mostly far more bitter. All the same, they have nothing to do with mutiny or lead-swinging. They are merely honest and call a thing by its name; for there is a very great deal of fraud, injustice, and baseness in the army.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

269. “It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think – honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair. They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

270. “Happiness lies all around us. We only have to pick it up.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

271. “We are burnt up by hard facts; like tradesmen we understand distinctions, and like butchers, necessities. We are no longer untroubled – we are indifferent. We might exist there; but should we really live there? 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

272. “Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied and rather mysteriously: “Revenge is black-pudding.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

273. “Our first experience of heavy artillery fire showed us our mistake, and the view of life that their teaching had given us fell to pieces under that bombardment.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

274. “Two years of rifle fire and hand grenades – you can’t just take it all off like a pair of socks afterwards -.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

275. “Our knowledge of life is limited to death.” – Paul Baumer.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

276. “We have almost grown accustomed to it; war is the cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

277. “All at once I feel utterly dejected. “What was the good of it all, Mother?” I say. She strokes my hand. “It must have been for some good, Ernst. The Father in heaven knows, you may be sure of that.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

278. “I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it. Before.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

279. “We often made fun of them and played jokes on them, but in our hearts we trusted them. The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

280. “There is nothing he likes more than just hearing about it. I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

281. “Albert expresses it: “The war has ruined us for everything.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

282. “So long as I do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to recall this forever, it will always come back and stand before me.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

283. “Only whatever you do, don’t lose your freedom. It is more precious than love and you only find our afterwards.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

284. “They used to tie us to a tree, but that is forbidden now. In many ways we are treated quite like men. An.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

285. “It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

286. “My hands grow cold and my flesh creeps; and yet the night is warm. Only the mist is cold, this mysterious mist that trails over the dead and sucks from them their last, creeping life. By morning they will be pale and green and their blood congealed and black.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

287. “Memory is a deadly disease for a refugee; it’s his cancer of the soul.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

288. “You have Weltschmerz. Don’t try and fight against it. Life is gay but imperfect.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

289. “The blonde girl twitters: “Bread – good – –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

290. “Once we had such desires – but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

291. “But the first death we saw shattered this belief. We had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs. They surpassed us only in phrases and in cleverness. The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

292. “Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

293. “We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough – and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

294. “I felt it, it excited me, and then it struck like a wave against the barrier reef – I knew she did not mean me at all; she meant someone else, some figure of her fantasy, Rolf or Rudolf; and perhaps she did not mean them either, perhaps they were just names thrown up from dark, subterranean streams, without roots or connections.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

295. “Modern trench-warfare demands knowledge and experience; a man must have a feeling for the contours of the ground, an ear for the sound and character of the shells, must be able to decide beforehand where they will drop, how they will burst, and how to shelter from them.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

296. “Kat turns his eyes to heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says meditatively: Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

297. “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

298. “Today we have done an hour’s saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can’t get it out of his head. “You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well,” he says. Kropp.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

299. “Even a soldier’s behind likes to sit soft.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

300. “Where would the world be if one brought every man to book? There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best – in a way that cost them nothing. And that is why they let us down so badly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque