Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “And now we realize what is expected – the Americans want to exchange. It is apparent that they have not long been in the war; they are still collecting souvenirs, shoulder straps, badges, belt buckles, decorations, uniform buttons. In exchange we stock ourselves with soap, cigarettes, chocolate and tinned meat. They even want us to take a handful of money for our dog – but we draw the line there; let them offer what they will, the dog stays with us.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

354. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

356. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

372. “Perhaps, thought I, perhaps – always that word, one never could escape it. It was certainty we lacked, certainty that everyone and everything lacked.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

373. “Das Licht war Gold und das Blau eine letzte, seidene Fahne des Sommers.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

374. “Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

375. “Many slept crouching and the lucky one was he whose bedfellows died in the evening. They were then carried away, and for one night he could stretch out until new arrivals came.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

376. “I find I do not belong here any more, it is a foreign world. Some of these people ask questions, some ask no questions, but no one can see that the latter are proud of themselves for their silence; they often say with a wise air that these things cannot be talked about.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

377. “The sergeant comes nearer. “It’s revolution,” he says quietly, “and who isn’t for us is against us.” Willy laughs. “Bloody fine revolution, no mistake! With your Society for the Removal of Shoulder Straps! If that’s all you want – ” He spits contemptuously. “Not so fast, Mate,” says the one-armed man, now walking swiftly toward him. “We do want a lot more! We want an end of war, an end of all this hatred! An end of murder! That’s what we’re after. We want to be men again, not war machines!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

378. “The head-master with the steel watch-chain wants to have at least the whole of Belgium, the coal-areas of France, and a slice of Russia.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

379. “Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

380. “Had we returned home in 1916, out of the suffering and the strength of our experience we might have unleashed a storm. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way any more.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

388. “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

389. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

390. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

392. “The stars are cold.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

400. “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