Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it. Before.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

302. “Before another three years passed, the book was being burned by the Nazis, who found the depiction of a disillusioned and demoralized German soldiery to be intolerably offensive.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

303. “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

304. “It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

318. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I will not have one friend left.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

337. “Doesn’t this make you sad, Ferdinand?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Cynical, if you like. One is sad when one thinks about life – cynical when one sees what people make of it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

340. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

342. “Don’t take it hardly,” said she, looking at me. “Everything passes.” “True,” said I. “The one sure thing in the world.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

343. “This habit of getting used to things is the reason that we seem to forget so quickly.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

344. “There were thousands of Kantoreks, all of whom were convinced that they were acting for the best –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

345. “And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is. I.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

346. “The coffins are really for us. The organization surpasses itself in that kind of thing.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

347. “I loved her very much, and it seemed to me that I had never loved her more, even when possessing her, than in this sordid night full of snoring, punctured by the strange hissing sound of urine falling on coal.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

348. “The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

349. “And we stand still again, and suddenly we feel that everything out there in front of us, that absolute hell, that ragged patch of shell-holes, is still there inside us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

350. “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