Top 400 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes (2024 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. “He had collapsed like a rotten tree.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

361. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

363. “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

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. “Words, Words, Words – they do not reach me.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

369. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

371. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

378. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

380. “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

381. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

391. “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

392. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

394. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

398. “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

399. “We have never been a very demonstrative family – poor people who have to work hard and cope with problems very rarely are.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

400. “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