Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Dem Soldaten ist sein Magen und seine Verdauung ein vertrauteres Gebiet als jedem anderen Menschen.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “Shortly after the war Valentin had come into a little money, and had been drinking it ever since. He considered it his duty to celebrate his good luck in having come out alive. It was nothing to him that that was now several years ago. One could never celebrate it enough, he used to explain. He was one of those with an uncanny memory of the war. The rest of us had forgotten many things; but he remembered every day and every hour.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

366. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

370. “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

371. “Yes, I think bitterly, that’s how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don’t dare to ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

372. “I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end. I ought never to have come on leave.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

373. “The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy; – dysentery dissolves our bowels.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

374. “Life was life, it was worth nothing and everything;.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

375. “The small tool of death was like a dynamo of life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

376. “But how can a man look after anyone in the field!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

377. “That they have, indeed! My sisters tell how they had to scrounge to get the supper together. Twice the gendarmes took everything from them at the station. The third time they sewed the eggs inside their cloaks, put the sausages into their blouses and hid the potatoes in pockets inside their skirts. That time they got through.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

378. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

379. “At last Ferdinand Kosole waltzes off with one, a husky wench with massive breastworks that should afford his gun a good lie. Now all the others are following his lead.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

381. “The stars are cold.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

382. “Don’t lose the address,” he said to Bucher. “Be a pity if we lost touch with one another.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

383. “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

384. “To hell with it. What was the use trying to make safe and sure our little life? Sooner or later the great wave must come and sweep it all away. “What about a drink with me, Fred?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

385. “The orchestra sounds a flourish. A chap with a chrysanthemum in his buttonhole comes to the front and explains that a couple will now give a demonstration of the latest thing from Berlin – a fox trot! That is unknown here as yet; we have only heard tell of it.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

386. “So long as a man doesn’t give in, he is still more than his fate.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

387. “Julge saab olla ainult siis, kui ka hirmu tuntakse.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

389. “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden. Kat shrugs his shoulders. “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

390. “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

391. “They were living corpses and died like flies in frost. The Small camp was full of them. They were broken and lost and nothing could save them – not even freedom.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

392. “He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

393. “We are not beaten, for as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven back by overwhelming superior forces.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

394. “It was not any recognition of their beauty and their significance that attracted us, but the communion, the feeling of a comradeship with the things and events of our existence, which cut us off and made the world of our parents a thing incomprehensible to us – for then we surrendered ourselves to events and were lost in them, and the least little thing was enough to carry us down the stream of eternity.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

395. “It was a long time since I had been in a theatre. And I would not have come now had Pat not wanted it. Theatres, concerts, books – all these middle-class habits I had almost lost. It was not the time for them. Politics provided theatre enough – the shootings every night made another concert – and the gigantic book of poverty was more impressive than any library.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

396. “They are different men here, men I cannot properly understand, whom I envy and despise.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

397. “And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

398. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

400. “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.”

— Erich Maria Remarque