Erich Maria Remarque Quotes & Sayings

We developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced - comradeship in arms. — Erich Maria Remarque

Help when you can; do everything then - but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You'll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn't mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives. — Erich Maria Remarque

Things become quieter, but the cries do not cease. "What's up, Albert?" I ask. "A couple of columns over there got it in the neck." The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. "Wounded horses," says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning. — Erich Maria Remarque

From this day forth I place
dressmakers above philosophers. Those people bring beauty
into life, and that's worth a hundred times the most unfathomable meditations. — 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

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces. — Erich Maria Remarque

There was always a screen behind which one could hide - a superior who in turn had his superior - orders, instructions, duties, commands - and finally the many-headed monster, morale, necessity, hard reality, responsibility, or whatever it was called - there was always a screen behind which to evade the simple law of humanity. — Erich Maria Remarque

It is the second night," he said. "The dangerous night. The charm of the unknown is gone and the charm of familiarity has not yet come. We'll survive it. — Erich Maria Remarque

prisoners come across to us. They seem nervous and fearful, though most of them are big fellows with beards - they look like meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs. They slink about — Erich Maria Remarque

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it. — Erich Maria Remarque

What's going on outside, Ravic?" "Nothing new, Kate. The world goes on eagerly preparing for suicide and at the same time deluding itself about what it's doing." "Will there be war?" "Everyone knows that there will be war. What one does not yet know is when. Everyone expects a miracle." Ravic smiled. "Never before have I seen so many politicians who believe in miracles as at present in France and England. And never so few as in Germany." She remained lying silent for a while. "To think that it should be possible - " she said then. "Yes - it seems so impossible that it will happen some day. Just because one considers it so impossible and doesn't protect oneself against it. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

There is no guilt in feelings ever. — Erich Maria Remarque

To be alone - the eternal refrain of life. It wasn't better or worse than anything else. One talked too much about it. One was always and never alone. A violin, suddenly - somewhere out of a twilight - in a garden on the hills around Budapest. The heavy scent of chestnuts. The wind. And dreams crouched on one's shoulders like young owls, their eyes becoming lighter in the dusk. A night that never became night. The hour when all women were beautiful. — Erich Maria Remarque

Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.
But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy. — Erich Maria Remarque

The simplest and the most incredible thing in the world had come true again: two people speaking to each other, each for himself; and sounds, called words, shaped the same images and feelings in that palpitating mass behind the skull, and out of meaningless vibrations of the vocal chords and their unexplainable reactions in the viscous gray convolutions, skies suddenly grew again in which were mirrored clouds, brooks, past times, growth and decay and hard-won wisdom. — Erich Maria Remarque

Unspoiled by education, frank and unsuspecting as young an8imals, they came up to school from their meadows, their games, and their dreams. The simple law of life was alone valid for them; the most vital, the most forceful among them was leader; the rest followed him. But little by little, with the weekly portions of tuition, another, artificial set of values was foisted upon them: he who knew his lesson best was termed excellent and ranked foremost, and the rest must emulate him. Little wonder, indeed, if the more vital of them resist it! But they have to knuckle under, for the ideal of the school is the good scholar.
But what an ideal! 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

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect. — 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

Today we have done an hour's saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can't get it out of his head. "You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well," he says. Kropp — Erich Maria Remarque

Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely. — 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

We agree that it's the same for everyone; not only for us here, but everywhere, for everyone who is of our age; to some more, and to others less. It is the common fate of our generation. — Erich Maria Remarque

There was too little solid ground under one's feet. — 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

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

Ach, darling, why aren't we rich? We have such marvellous ideas of what to do with it. There are so many rich people who can do no better than go backwards and forwards to their banks and offices."
"That's why they are rich, of course," said I. "If we were rich we certainly wouldn't be so for long. — 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

Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness. — Erich Maria Remarque

Look, if you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it'll still grab it because it's in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he'll grab it. It's instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you spread dripping on your bread. — Erich Maria Remarque

The screaming of the beasts becomes louder. One can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth it rolls on immeasurably. — Erich Maria Remarque

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death. — Erich Maria Remarque

In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum. — Erich Maria Remarque

I hate it when people mix things, I hate the cowlike yearning toward one another while the beauty and the power of a great work breaks over one; I hate the swimming looks of lovers, the foolish blissful cuddling, the indecent sheepish happiness that can never rise above itself; I hate all the talk of becoming one through love; — Erich Maria Remarque

If we were not automata at that moment we would continue lying there, exhausted, and without will. But we are swept forward again, powerless, madly savage and raging; we will kill, for they are still our mortal enemies, their rifles and bombs are aimed against us, and if we don't destroy them, they will destroy us. — Erich Maria Remarque

509 sat down with his back to the barrack wall. It had still kept some warmth from the sun. Bucher came and sat down beside him. "Strange," he said. "Sometimes hundreds die and one doesn't feel anything, and then a single man dies, one who doesn't even concern us much - and it seems as though it were a thousand."
509 nodded. "Imagination cannot count. And feeling does not grow stronger through numbers. It can never count beyond one. One - but that's enough if one feels it. — Erich Maria Remarque

How various is a face; but an hour ago it was strange and it is now touched with a tenderness that comes, not from it, but from out of the night, the world and the blood, all these things seem to shine in it together. — 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

Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. What's more, there are whole races who believe 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

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

The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal ... It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of life seemed pulsing in it; there were no burdens any more, no limits; there existed only glory and melody and love, so that one simply could not realize that, at the same time as this music was, outside there ruled poverty and torment and despair. — 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

We didn't want the war, the others say the same thing - and yet half the world is in it all the same." "But there are more lies told by the other side than by us," say I; "just think of those pamphlets the prisoners have on them, where it says that we eat Belgian children. The fellows who write those lies ought to go out and hang themselves. They are real culprits. — Erich Maria Remarque

One is never too young. Only always too old. — Erich Maria Remarque

I often sit over against myself, as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle that calls itself to life has adapted itself even to this form. All other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual watch against the menace of death; - it has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct - it has reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious thought - it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we escape the abyss of solitude - it has lent us the indifference of wild creatures, so that in spite of all, we perceive the positive in every moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up. Those — Erich Maria Remarque

An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him. — Erich Maria Remarque

A man has to have something he can put faith in. — Erich Maria Remarque

These memories of former times do not awaken desire so much as sorrow
a vast, inapprehensible melancholy. Once we had such desires
but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us. They are completely lost to us. They arise no more; we are dead and they stand remote on the horizon, they are a mysterious reflection, an apparition that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are unattainable and we know it.
And even if these scenes of our youth were given back to us, we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in memory; but the man himself it is not. — Erich Maria Remarque

The music surged down the stairs like a flashing stream - it gathered in the corridor and burst like a waterfall through the wide entry doors. It splashed over a small, lonely figure crouching on the lowest step, dark and colorless like an un-moving lump of black, a little hillock with mad, unresting eyes. It was the old man who had freed himself with such difficulty from the unrelenting window. He crouched in the corner, lost and done for, with bowed shoulders and knees drawn high, as though he would never rise again - and over him, and away in gay and flashing cascades, the music splashed and danced, strong, pitiless, unceasing as life itself. — Erich Maria Remarque

One always expects something else. — Erich Maria Remarque

There she stands before me, and old woman with an anxious, care-worn face. Her hands are clasped - weary, toil-worn hands with a soft, wrinkled skin, where the veins stand out bluish; hands become so for my sake. - I never thought of that before. There is a lot I did not think of before; I was too young. But now I understand how it is that to this withered, little woman I am something different from any other soldier in the world: I am her child. To her I have always remained so, even as a soldier. In the war she has seen only a pack of wild beasts threatening the life of her child. It has never occurred to her that this same threatened child has been just such another wild beast to the children of yet other mothers. My — Erich Maria Remarque

State and home country, there's a difference — 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 flavor 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. — Erich Maria Remarque

In any case, the bayonet isn't as important as it used to be. It's more usual now to go into the attack with hand-grenades and your entrenching tool. The sharpened spade is a lighter and more versatile weapon - not only can you get a man under the chin, but more to the point, you can strike a blow with a lot more force behind it. That's especially true if you can bring it down diagonally between the neck and the shoulder, because then you can split down as far as the chest. When you put a bayonet in, it can stick, and you have to give the other man a hefty kick in the guts to get it out. — Erich Maria Remarque

If you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it'll still grab it because it's in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he'll grab it. It's instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you can spread dripping on your bread. — Erich Maria Remarque

He begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life. — Erich Maria Remarque

My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my father's life has been practically given up to it. "If only I knew how much the operation costs," says he. "Have you not asked?" "Not directly. I cannot do that - the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on Mother." Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor people. They don't dare 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. And the doctor does not take it amiss from them. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

He was pious ... He must ... He can't possibly have remembered that this way he would not be allowed to lie in consecrated earth."
"He probably didn't think about it at all. But don't grieve at what your pastor says. I know thousands of very pious Catholics who lie in unconsecrated earth."
"Where?"
"On the battlefields in Russia and France. They lie there all together in mass graves, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, and I don't think it makes a bit of difference to God. — Erich Maria Remarque

Going away is not always so simple - when one takes oneself along. — Erich Maria Remarque

I felt today when the night melted away into a flowering bush and the wind smelled of strawberries and without love one is only a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it and one might as well die — Erich Maria Remarque

Those are for us,' growls Detering. 'Don't talk rubbish,' Kat snaps back at him. 'You'll be lucky to get a coffin at all,' grins Tjaden, 'they'll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see. — Erich Maria Remarque

A strange night, he thought. Somewhere now there is shooting and men are being hunted and imprisoned and tortured and murdered, some corner of a peaceful world is being trampled upon, and one knows it, helplessly, and life buzzes on in the bright bistros of the city, no one cares, and people go calmly to sleep, and I am sitting here with a woman between pale chrysanthemums and a bottle of calvados, and the shadow of love rises, trembling, lonesome, strange and sad, it too an exile from the safe gardens of the past, shy and wild and quick as if it had no right — Erich Maria Remarque

So I thought. Are you happy?"
"What's that?"
"Don't you know yet? But who really knows what it is? Dancing on the head of a pin, maybe. — Erich Maria Remarque

A bitch. No prostitute. A bitch. If you were a Russian you would understand. — Erich Maria Remarque

A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it's gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change. If I can just call it to life now, won't it always stay the same? Won't it stay with me as long as I live? — Erich Maria Remarque

Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child - why can I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the wardrobe still hang short, boy's trousers - it is such a little time ago, why is it over? — Erich Maria Remarque

And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not. — Erich Maria Remarque

Beyond this our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains. — Erich Maria Remarque

Thoughtfully I resume my patrolling to and fro between the benches. Now and again I catch a searching glance above the edge of a copy book. I stand still near the stove and look at the young faces. Most of them are good-natured and ordinary, some are sly, others stupid; but in a few there is a flicker of something brighter. For these life will not be so obvious and all things will not go so smoothly. Suddenly — Erich Maria Remarque

We are two men, two minute sparks of life; outside is the night and the circle of death. We sit
on the edge of it crouching in danger, the grease drips from our hands, in our hearts we are close
to one another, and the hour is like the room: flecked over with the lights and shadows of our
feelings cast by a quiet fire. What does he know of me or I of him? formerly we should not have
had a single thought in common--now we sit with a goose between us and feel in unison, are so
intimate that we do not even speak. — Erich Maria Remarque

Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again - words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it! — Erich Maria Remarque

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

See what has become of us. As far as I know, only the old Greeks had gods of drinking and the joy of life: Bacchus and Dionysus. Instead of that we have Freud, inferiority complexes and the psychoanalysis. We're afraid of the too great words in love and not afraid of much too great words in politics. A sorry generation! — Erich Maria Remarque

Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich's. I let him be. — Erich Maria Remarque

A man is courageous
only when he is also afraid. — Erich Maria Remarque

What has that to do with love?"
"A great deal. It takes care of its continuance. Otherwise we would love once only and reject everything else later. But as it is, the remnant of desire for the man one leaves behind, or by whom one is left behind, becomes the halo around the head of the new one. To have lost someone before in itself gives the new one a certain romantic glamour. The hallowed old illusion. — 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 train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot. — 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

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

This first hour of arrival before one was again pierced by knives and arrows - this strange animal feeling, this breath reaching far and coming from afar, this breeze, without emotion yet, along the streets of the heart, past the dull fires of facts, past the nail-studded cross of bygone days and past the barbed hooks of the future, this caesura, the silence within oscillation, the moment of pause, most open and most secret form of being, the unemphatic beat of eternity in the very transitoriness of the world — Erich Maria Remarque

I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;
then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees.
The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth. — Erich Maria Remarque

We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth. — Erich Maria Remarque

The spires of the town below shimmer green, the roofs steam, and smoke rises silver from the chimneys. Georg points downward. Like spiders they lurk there in their offices, their shops, their professions, each one of them ready to suck the other man dry. And then the rest hanging over each one of them - families, societies, authorities, laws, the State! One spider's web over another! True, one may call that life, if one likes, and a man may even pride himself on crawling about under it his forty years and more; but I learned at the Front that time is not the measure of life. Why should I climb down forty years? I have been putting all my money for years now on one card and the stake has always been life. I can't play now for halfpence, and small advances. — Erich Maria Remarque

What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo! — Erich Maria Remarque

I realize he does not know that a man cannot talk of such things; I would do it willingly, but it is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them. What would become of us if everything that happens out there were quite clear to us? — Erich Maria Remarque

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

Ravic knew the danger; he knew whither he was going and he also knew that tomorrow he would resist again - but suddenly in this night, in this hour of his return from a lost Ararat into the blood-smell of coming destruction, everything became nameless. Danger was danger and not danger; fate was at the same time a sacrifice and the deity to whom one sacrificed. And tomorrow was an unknown world — Erich Maria Remarque

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth. — Erich Maria Remarque

I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it shows through blue-black like poison. — Erich Maria Remarque

The heroes of ancient Greece wept more often than our silly, sentimental modern women. They knew it did no good to hold it back. Our ideal is the impassive courage of a statue. Unnecessary. Be sad and then you'll soon be over it. — Erich Maria Remarque

A lifetime, she thought, and every day was like every other, the endless routine, day after day, and at the end of the year the days coalesced as if they had been only a single day, so much were they alike, and, similarly, the years coalesced as if they had only been a single year, so everlastingly the same were they. — Erich Maria Remarque

The State, that immune betrayer, which embezzles billions and jails anyone who defrauds it of as much as five marks, would find some pretext for not paying. — Erich Maria Remarque

We have yielded no more than a few hundred yards of it as a prize to the enemy. But on every yard there lies a dead man. — Erich Maria Remarque

And be very careful at the front, Paul."
Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are! — Erich Maria Remarque

When we love each other we are immortal and indestructible like the heartbeat and the rain and the wind. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

Children, that's what a man needs - children, who know nothing about it. — Erich Maria Remarque