Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

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.

A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. We're living in a time when all standards are turned upside-down, Kern. 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!

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!

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.

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

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

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.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Может быть, у смерти совсем другое имя. Мы ведь видим ее всегда только с одной стороны. Мо�

- Ты хочешь знать, как быть, если сделал что-то не так? Отвечаю, детка: никогда не проси про�

A man has to have something he can put faith in. Can't you see that? What I want is someone that will love me; she would have me and I her. Otherwise a man may just go hang himself

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.

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.

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."
- All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5

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.

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.

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.

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial - I believe we are lost.

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

The things men did or felt they had to do.