Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Wenn man so viele Tote gesehen hat, kann man so viel Schmerz um einen einzigen nicht mehr recht begreifen.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

307. “They are many indeed that lie there, though until now we have not thought of it so. Hitherto we have just all remained there together, they in the graves, we in the trenches, divided only by a few handfuls of earth. They were but a little before us; daily we became less and they more, and often we have not known whether we already belonged to them or not.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

308. “Her mouth speaks words I do not understand. Nor do I fully understand her eyes; they seem to say more than we anticipated when we came here.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

312. “The misery of millions is too big a price to pay for the heroics of a few.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

313. “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

314. “That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting. The subject.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

315. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “Don’t ask anything more. There are more secrets in your hair than in a thousand questions.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

332. “It keeps bobbing back disconcertingly, and then you are confronted by irreconcilable contrast: the skies of childhood and the science of killing, lost youth and the cynicism of knowledge gained too young.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

334. “We stroll on. Late in the evening we run into Willy and set off together for the barracks. En route Willy suddenly springs to one side and I crouch down likewise. The unmistakable howl of a shell coming – then we look round mystified and laugh. It was merely the screech of an electric tram.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

335. “Dem Soldaten ist sein Magen und seine Verdauung ein vertrauteres Gebiet als jedem anderen Menschen.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

336. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

338. “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

339. “Geriau mirti tada, kai dar nori gyventi, negu tada, kai jau nori mirti.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

343. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

345. “You do, Bob. You have the requirements for it. A certain simplicity is necessary for love. You have it. Keep it. It is a gift of God. Never to be gotten again once it is lost.” “Don’t take it to heart too much, though, Baby,” said Lenz with a grin. “It’s no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

346. “It’s odd,’ she murmured, ’but as long as we don’t forget that we’re falling and falling, nothing is lost. Life seems to love paradoxes – when we think we’re perfectly safe, we’re always ridiculous and on the verge of a tumble; but when we know we’re lost, life showers gifts on us. Then we don’t have to do a thing – it runs after us like a poodle.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “While I was despairing and thinking everything was lost, it was quietly growing. I thought that parting was always final. Now I know that growing is a kind of parting. To grow means to leave something behind. And there is no end to it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque