Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

353. “The stars are cold.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

360. “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

361. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

368. “I am aware that I, without realizing it, have lost my feelings – I don’t belong here anymore, I live in an alien world. I prefer to be left alone, not disturbed by anybody. They talk too much – I can’t relate to them – they are only busy with the superficial things.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

369. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

375. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

377. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

379. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

381. “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

382. “In the afternoon, about three, he is dead. I.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

383. “We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “We all feed on one another. Such occasional little sparks of kindliness – that’s something one shouldn’t allow to be taken away. It strengthens one for a difficult life.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

389. “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

390. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

393. “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

394. “Suddenly I realized that this was the beginning of a new life. But was it possible to start over again from scratch? To make myself at home in this new, unknown language? And, most frightening of all after all these years of fighting for survival, to learn once more how to live? And if I succeeded in coming back to life, would I not be betraying all my dead friends and loved ones?”

— 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. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

398. “Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

399. “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

400. “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