Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Habit is the explanation of why we seem to forget things so quickly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

304. “Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets used to that sort of thing in the army.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

305. “He had collapsed like a rotten tree.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

306. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

308. “It cannot be that it has gone, the yearning that made our blood unquiet, the unknown, the perplexing, the incoming things, the thousand faces of the future, the melodies from dreams and from books, the whispers and divination of women; it cannot be that this has vanished in bombardment, in despair, in brothels.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

309. “I am conscious of the nameless sadness of Time that runs and runs on and changes, and when a man returns he shall find nothing again. – Yes, it is a hard thing to part; but to come back again, that is sometimes far harder.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

310. “They wear grey coats and trousers and boots, but for most of them the uniform is far too big, it hangs on their limbs, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; no uniform was ever made to these childish measurements.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

311. “Safe in his cage,′ she repeated. ‘Who wants to be safe in a cage?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

312. “The noises from outside all merge into one another, become a dream which disappears from the waking memory... he sees the woods and stars behind him, and so he moves on, an ordinary soldier, with his big boots and his webbing and his pack, making his tiny way under the sky’s great vault along the road that lies before him; a soldier who forgets things quickly and who isn’t even depressed much any more, but who just goes onwards under the great night sky.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

313. “It was not the first time I had caught her so. She used to come to us for two hours every morning to clean up the workshop; and though one might leave as much money lying around as one liked she would never disturb it – but schnapps she could smell out as far off as a rat a slice of bacon.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

314. “They are not really thoughts; they are memories that come to torment me in my weakness and put me into a strange mood. Up go.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

315. “Fate had struck while she sat unsuspecting, had struck somewhere on one of the many curves of this cursed course. The seconds became leaden, the minutes hours. The carrousel on the white ribbon existed now only like a bad dream; her chest became a black cavity, hollowed out with waiting.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

316. “All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

317. “For a moment I held her hand in mine and felt her warm, dry pressure. Then I went out to get the rum. The night stood big and silent about the little house. The leather seats of our car were moist. I stood and looked toward the horizon where the red glow of the city rose against the sky. I would gladly have stayed out there; but already I could hear Lenz calling.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

318. “She let herself drift; the crowd sustained her and did not shock her; she loved it because it was life, unknown, thoughtless, foolish life devoted to the thoughtless and foolish goals which bobbed on its surface like colored buoys on a choppy sea.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

319. “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. Katczinsky said that was a result of their upbringing. It made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

320. “We are all curious. “But why did you say you did it? It wasn’t you at all.” He grins. “That doesn’t matter. I have a shooting license.” Then of course, we all understand. Whoever has a shooting license can do just whatever he pleases. “Yes,” he explains. “I got a crack in the head and they presented me with a certificate to say that I was periodically not responsible for my actions. Ever since then I’ve had a grand time. No one dares to annoy me. And nobody does anything to me.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

321. “There is the great sky again, and the stars, and the first streak of dawn, and he is walking beneath that sky, a soldier with big boots and a full belly, a little soldier in the early morning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

322. “One man’s destroyer is another’s nightingale.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

323. “ALREADY KNOW the camp on the moors. It was here that Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education. But now I know hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered. There are only a few people that I have occasionally met before. I go through the routine mechanically. In the evenings I generally.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

324. “And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

327. “Man lives, you’re right! Whoever seeks further is already lost.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

328. “The cries continued, it is not men, they could not cry so terribly. ‘Wounded horses’, says Kat. It is is unendurable, it is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror and groaning.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

330. “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

331. “Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is; they are the voices of my pals.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

332. “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

333. “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

334. “From the kitchen was now issuing the smell of freshly brewed coffee and I heard Frida rumbling about. It was curious, but the smell of coffee made me more cheerful. I knew that from the war; it was never the big things that consoled one – it was always the unimportant, the little things.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

335. “The solicitor for whom he used to work in Cologne has written to tell him that women are now doing the work excellently and more cheaply, whereas Jupp, during his time in the army, will have grown out of office requirements, no doubt. He deeply regrets it, so he says; the times are hard. Best wishes for the future.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

336. “The stars are cold.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

337. “Life was something too great, and death also had something too great about it; they were not to be played with. Having courage was a different thing from having no fear; courage was consciousness of danger, fearlessness mere ignorance.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

338. “The dark turns into madness. It rocks and rages. Dark things, darker than the night itself, rush upon us in great waves, over us and onwards.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

339. “It keeps them going, staves off the evil day when they will be alone. And to be alone, really alone, without illusion, that way lies madness – and suicide.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

340. “Lenz sat in the Stutz and we drove slowly off. I held my handkerchief to my nose and looked out over the evening fields and into the sinking sun. There was an immense, unshakeable peace in it, and one felt how utterly indifferent nature was to anything that this evil-tempered ant-heap called humanity might choose to do in the world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

341. “I thought nothing; I didn’t even despair; I was just stupefied and grey and dead.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

342. “All that meets me, all that floods over me are but feelings – greed of life, love of home, yearning for the blood, intoxication of deliverance.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

343. “Only thus were we prepared for what awaited us. We did not break down, but adapted ourselves; our twenty years, which made many another thing so grievous, helped us in this. But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war – comradeship.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

344. “Because none can ever wholly feel what another suffers – is that the reason why wars perpetually recur?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

345. “We stand and gaze. The farmhouse, the remnants of the wood, the heights, the trenches on the sky yonder, – it had been a terrible world and life a burden. Now it is over and will stay behind here; when we set out, it will drop behind us, step by step, and in an hour be gone as if it had never been. – Who can realize it?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

346. “I hadn’t failed, I had gained a second, heaven-sent life with Helen – and even the despair that had come to me and still haunted my sleep from time to time was possible only because there had been something else: Paris, Helen, and the unbelievable feeling of not being alone.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

347. “We are two human beings, two tiny sparks of life; outside there is just the night, and all around us, death.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

348. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

349. “He it is still and yet it is not he any longer.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

350. “What ever came of the good scholars in the world? – In the hothouse of the school they do enjoy a short semblance of life, but only the more surely to sink back afterward into mediocrity and insignificance. The world has been bettered only by the bad scholars.”

— Erich Maria Remarque