Erich Maria Remarque was a German novelist. His landmark novel Im Westen nichts Neues, about the German military experience of World War I, was an international best-seller which created a new literary genre, and was adapted into a film in 1930.Explore Famous Erich Maria Remarque Quotes.
1) ”Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs to the museum.”
2) ”Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
3) ”To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory.There’s much too little forgetting.”He who wants to hold on to that is losing. Those who are ready to let go with a smile are trying to keep him.”
4)The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.”
5) ”The first person you think of in the morning and the last person you think at night is either the cause of your happiness or the cause of your pain.”
6) ”Not always sorry for the one who is wrong. Asking forgiveness of the one who values the relation.”
7) ”I feel like I am among the people who are going to live forever. At least that is how they act. They also so obsessed with money that they forgotten about life.”
8) ”Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
9) ”The best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.”
10) ”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.”
11) ”Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It’s one of the most important secrets of living.”
28) ”Being in love is when you want to get old with someone.”
29) ”It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
30) ”It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
31) ”We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial we are lost.”
32) ”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.”
33) ”Life is a disease, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat,is a moment of dying- a little shove towards the end.”
34) ”We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
35) ”Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades- words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
36) ”It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”
37) ”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.”
38) ”If a woman saves a money on herself, it means that it makes men want to save money for her.”
39) ”Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”
40) ”Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.”
41) ”If a woman is angry it means she is not only wrong, but also she knows it.”
42) ”No soldier outlives a thousands chances. But every soldier believes in chance and trust his luck.”
43) ”A woman becomes smarter when she is in love, whereas a man loses his mind.”
44) ”What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love.”
45) ”Good or ill, life is life, you only realize that when you have to risk it.”
46) ”Who has many woman-knows woman. Who has one wife-knows love.”
47) ”A friend standing behind is worse than a enemy standing in front.”
48) ”If a man is not married at 30, it means that he has not been forced to get married yet. Men don’t get married because they want to get married, but because women want to get married.”
49) ”The things men did or felt they had to do.”
50) ”Love should not be polluted with friendship.”
51) ”No one could become stranger than the person you once loved.”
52) ”Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.”
53) ”Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel.”
54) ”Heaven has no favorites.”
55) ”A hospital alone shows what war is.”
56) ”I want to think and at the same time that’s the last thing in the world I want to do.”
57) ”We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.”
58) ”It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
59) ”Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs to the museum.”
60) ”With blinded eyes I started at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy God, who had made life and death for his amusement.”
61) ”Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
62) ”The war has ruined us for everything.”
63) ”To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.”
64) ”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.”
65) ”All quiet on the western front.”
66) ”Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today- when it meant so little.”
67) ”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.”
68) ”We were all at once terribly alone and alone we must see it through.”
69) ”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.”
70) ”No one could become stranger than the person you once loved.”
71) ”It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
72) ”To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its center, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.”
73) ”Suddenly I become filled with a consuming impatience to be gone.”
74) ”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.”
75) ”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.”
76) ”It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”
77) ”Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.”
78) ”One is never too young. Only always too old.”
79) ”We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead man, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill.”
80) ”Trenches, hospitals, the common grave, there are no other possibilities.”
81) ”Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.”
82) ”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.”
83) ”Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”
84) ”I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.”
85) ”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.”
86) ”The things men did or felt they had to do.”
87) ”It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speaks to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent-and their silence is precisely what disturbs me.”
88) ”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.”
89) ”Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.”
90) ”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. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.”
91) ”You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”
92) ”Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.”
93) ”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.”
94) ”The devil take all conventions, they were made for other times.”
95) ”I want to say something, but I could not. It is difficult to find words when one really has something to say. And even if one knows the right words, then one is ashamed to say them. All these words belong to other, earlier centuries. our time has not the words yet to express its feelings. We can only be offhand-anything else rings false.”
96) ”The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”
97) ”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.”
98) ”In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum.”
99) ”I soon found out this much-terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks; but it kills, if a man thinks about it.”
100) ”We don’t act like that because we are in good humor; we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.”
101) ”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.”
102) ”Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?”
103) ”Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
104) ”A man dreams of a miracle and wakes up to loaves of bread.”
105) ”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.”
106) ”His misfortune was that he saw a cherry tree in a garden.”
107) ”Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same agony-forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
108) ”While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stranger.”
109) ”There is something good about unpleasant memories; they make you think you’re happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary.”
110) ”Take twenty years of my life, comrade,and stand up-take more, for i do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.”
111) ”Beyond this our life did not extend.And of this nothing remains.”
112) ”Those who considered themselves fair, are particularly ruthless.”
113) ”Regret is the most useless things in the world. One cannot recall anything. And one cannot rectify anything. Otherwise we would all be saints.Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”
