Quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

About Erich Maria Remarque:

Erich Maria Remarque is best-known for his breakthrough novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) about German soldiers in the First World War, which was also made into a Oscar-winning movie. His pacifistic attitudes made him an enemy of the Nazism, who burned many of his works. Remarque later lived in Switzerland and in the United States.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

Erich Maria Remarque

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 a...

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

It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

Erich Maria Remarque

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That...

Erich Maria Remarque

A hospital alone shows what war is.

Erich Maria Remarque

One always expects something else.

Erich Maria Remarque

Love should not be polluted with friendship.

Erich Maria Remarque

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.

Erich Maria Remarque

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.

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

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

Erich Maria Remarque

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Erich Maria Remarque

We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.

Erich Maria Remarque

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and compromising than the big fellows.

Erich Maria Remarque

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

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing...

Erich Maria Remarque

Jeigu būtų kur nors pasaulyje tokia vieta, kur tikrai vieną valandą per visus metus būtų galima gauti ką nors valgomo, jis kaip tik šią valandą, tarsi kokio įkvėpimo genamas, užsidėtų kepurę, išeitų, nueitų tiesiai lyg pagal kompas...

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 go...

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 ...

Erich Maria Remarque

From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her...

Erich Maria Remarque

Author Bio

  • NameErich Maria Remarque
  • DescriptionGerman novelist
  • AliasesErich Paul Remark
  • BornJune 22, 1898
  • DiedSeptember 25, 1970
  • CountryGermany; United States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Playwright
  • WorksAll Quiet On The Western Front
  • AwardsGrand Merit Cross Of The Order Of Merit Of The Federal Republic Of Germany