Erich Maria Remarque famous quotes

04-19-2025

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

#Waiting #Terrible
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Museums #Perfect
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Veterans Day #Believe #Soldier
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.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Brother #Dying #Disease
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#May
The things men did or felt they had to do.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Men
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

#Crazy #Eye #Sky
we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
-- 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

#Real #Sadness #Profound
We are not youth any longer. We donâ€™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

#Love Life #Storm #Fleeing
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

#War #Book #Adventure
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Strange #Complicated #Feels
I had the feeling of slipping down a smooth bottomless pit. It had nothing to do with Breuer and the people. It had nothing to do with Pat even. It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life â€” and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Reality #People #Feelings
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go outâ€¦we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the nightâ€¦and thus we wait for morning.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Morning #Wall #Eye
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Memories #Secret #Littles
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Dream #Bears
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

#War #Simple #People
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

#War #Lying #Blood
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

#Jealous #Doe #Chance
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.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Voice #Comforting #Comrade
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Mirrors #World
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. 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 dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Mother #Men #Hands
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

#Thinking #Done #Might
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Reality #Secret #Desire
Heaven Has No Favorites
-- Erich Maria Remarque

#Heaven

You may also like: