Quotes from Erich Maria Remarque

Anyway the war is over so far as they are concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

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.

We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep, and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies, and drink and smoke so that hours are not wasted. Life is short.

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.

Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.

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.

Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.

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.

Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.

It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

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.

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 from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.

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.

Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

It's no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.

It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.

Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.

No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.