Erich Maria Remarque
A hospital alone shows what war is.Collection: Alone
Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.Collection: War
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any non-commissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil, then they are if they were free.
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.
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.
Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.Collection: Simple
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.Collection: Museums
We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.Collection: Dream
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!Collection: Strange
Anything you can settle with money is cheap.Collection: Settling
It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.Collection: Waiting
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.Collection: Rewards
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.Collection: May
To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Brother
Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.Collection: World
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.Collection: Mirrors
Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.Collection: Risk
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.Collection: Men
No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.Collection: Matter
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.Collection: Memories
We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Crazy
Every little bean must be heard as well as seen!Collection: Littles
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.Collection: Generations
Our knowledge of life is limited to deathCollection: Life Is
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.Collection: Lying
Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.Collection: Mirrors
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.Collection: Youth
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.Collection: Missing
I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.Collection: Thinking
What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!Collection: Skins
Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.Collection: Kissing
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Stars
No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.Collection: Veterans Day
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Love Life
The things men did or felt they had to do.Collection: Men
Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: War
Heaven Has No FavoritesCollection: Heaven
... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.Collection: Mankind
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?Collection: Mother
It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.Collection: Reality