103+ Erich Maria Remarque Quotes On Marriage, War And Impassioned

Erich Maria Remarque was a German writer and veteran of World War I. He is best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which depicted the horrors of war. Remarque was a pacifist who opposed war and wrote several novels and short stories about the experiences of soldiers during World War I. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Erich Maria Remarque on marriage, war, love.

Top 10 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

1. We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
2. Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.
3. To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
4. No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.
5. The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
6. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.
7. Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
8. Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.
9. They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.
10. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

Erich Maria Remarque Short Quotes

• Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
• Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
• ... clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting.
• Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
• Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.
• The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it
• Every little bean must be heard as well as seen!
• Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
• My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
• ... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.

Erich Maria Remarque Quotes About War

This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. — Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces. — Erich Maria Remarque

A hospital alone shows what war is. — Erich Maria Remarque

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well. — Erich Maria Remarque

Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3 — Erich Maria Remarque

The war has ruined us for everything. — Erich Maria Remarque

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war. — Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque Quotes About Love

Am I jealous? he thought, astonished. Jealous of the chance object to which she has attached herself? Jealous of something that does not concern me? One can be jealous of a love that has turned away, but not of that to which it has turned. — Erich Maria Remarque

We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. — Erich Maria Remarque

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love! — Erich Maria Remarque

For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge. — Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque Quotes About Life

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement. — Erich Maria Remarque

Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness;--I belong to them and they to me; we all share the same fear and the same life...I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me. — Erich Maria Remarque

Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either. — Erich Maria Remarque

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum. — Erich Maria Remarque

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little. — Erich Maria Remarque

Our knowledge of life is limited to death — Erich Maria Remarque

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside. — Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque Quotes About Streets

On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty; only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square. — Erich Maria Remarque

The later it gets the more disturbed the city becomes. I go with Albert through the streets. Men are standing in groups at every corner. Rumours are flying. It is said that the military have already fired on a procession of demonstrating workers. — Erich Maria Remarque

I wandered through the streets thinking of all the things I might have said and might have done had I been other than I was. — Erich Maria Remarque

Erich Maria Remarque Famous Quotes And Sayings

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning. — Erich Maria Remarque

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh. — Erich Maria Remarque

(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn. — Erich Maria Remarque

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them. — Erich Maria Remarque

We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here. — Erich Maria Remarque

We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals. — Erich Maria Remarque

I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting. — Erich Maria Remarque

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost. — Erich Maria Remarque

I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty. — Erich Maria Remarque

We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 6 — Erich Maria Remarque

To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself. — Erich Maria Remarque

Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without. — Erich Maria Remarque

I did not want to think so much about her. I wanted to take her as an unexpected, delightful gift, that had come and would go again — nothing more. I meant not to give room to the thought that it could ever be more. I knew too well that all love has the desire for eternity and that therein lies its eternal torment. Nothing lasts. Nothing. — Erich Maria Remarque

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. — Erich Maria Remarque

At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs. — Erich Maria Remarque

The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it until the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires. — Erich Maria Remarque

The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in the night shattered life groans painfully into silence. Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We do not know whether we are still alive. — Erich Maria Remarque

For us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity, the world of work, of duty, of culture, of progress -- to the future. — Erich Maria Remarque

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades - words, words, but they hold the horror of the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by." - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 2 — Erich Maria Remarque

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts. — Erich Maria Remarque

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck. — Erich Maria Remarque

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for. — Erich Maria Remarque

The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom? — Erich Maria Remarque

No soldier outlives a thousand chances. — Erich Maria Remarque

Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk. — Erich Maria Remarque

-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it. — Erich Maria Remarque

That is the remarkable thing about drinking: it brings people together so quickly, but between night and morning it sets an interval again of years. — Erich Maria Remarque

They are more human and more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more unfortunate than us. — Erich Maria Remarque

Katczinsky says it is all to do with education - it softens the brain. — Erich Maria Remarque

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it. — Erich Maria Remarque

But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else. — Erich Maria Remarque

we have so much to say, and we shall never say it. — Erich Maria Remarque

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more. — Erich Maria Remarque

Heaven Has No Favorites — Erich Maria Remarque

The things men did or felt they had to do. — Erich Maria Remarque

You may turn into an archangel, a fool, or a criminal—no one will see it. But when a button is missing—everyone sees that. — Erich Maria Remarque

There was only the broad square with the scattered dim moons of the street lamps and with the monumental stone arch which receded into the mist as though it would prop up the melancholy sky and protect beneath itself the faint lonely flame on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which looked like the last grave of mankind in the midst of night and loneliness. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory. — Erich Maria Remarque

Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to. — Erich Maria Remarque

He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come. — Erich Maria Remarque

Little by little things began to assume a new aspect. The sense of insecurity vanished, words came of themselves, I was no longer so painfully conscious of everything I said. I drank on and felt the great soft wave approach and embrace me; the dark hour began to fill with pictures and stealthily the noiseless procession of dreams appeared again superimposed on the dreary, grey landscape of existence. — Erich Maria Remarque

Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free. — Erich Maria Remarque

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language. — Erich Maria Remarque

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living. — Erich Maria Remarque

I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait. — Erich Maria Remarque

Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world. — Erich Maria Remarque

We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. — Erich Maria Remarque

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom. — Erich Maria Remarque

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting — Erich Maria Remarque

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do. — Erich Maria Remarque

Anything you can settle with money is cheap. — Erich Maria Remarque

Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me." -All Quiet On The Western Front, Chapter 12 — Erich Maria Remarque

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them. — Erich Maria Remarque

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war. — Erich Maria Remarque

Kat and Kropp get in an argument over the war as they rest from an hour’s worth of drill (occasioned by Tjaden’s not saluting a major properly). Kat believes the war would be over if leaders gave all the participants “the same grub and the same pay,” as he says in a rhyme. Kropp believes the leaders of each country should fight each other in an arena to settle the war; the “wrong” people currently do the fighting. — Erich Maria Remarque

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through. — Erich Maria Remarque

Life Lessons by Erich Maria Remarque

1. Erich Maria Remarque teaches us that life is fragile and unpredictable, and we must take every opportunity to appreciate the moments we have with the people we love.
2. He also encourages us to be resilient in the face of adversity, and to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
3. Finally, he reminds us that life is a precious gift, and we should strive to make the most of it by living with integrity, kindness, and compassion.