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

352. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

355. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

357. “It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down?”

— Erich Maria Remarque

358. “The blonde girl twitters: “Bread – good – –.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

359. “It keeps them going, staves off the evil day when they will be alone. And to be alone, really alone, without illusion, that way lies madness – and suicide.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

360. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

362. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

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

— 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 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

382. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

384. “Nobody can deceive a dying farmer!”

— Erich Maria Remarque

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

391. “I loved her very much, and it seemed to me that I had never loved her more, even when possessing her, than in this sordid night full of snoring, punctured by the strange hissing sound of urine falling on coal.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

395. “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

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

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

— Erich Maria Remarque

399. “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

400. “Where do flies go in winter?”

— Erich Maria Remarque