Quotes from Erich Maria Remarque

There was too little solid ground under one's feet.

Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

Isterijos ir baim?s apimti žmon?s seka paskui lozungus, nepriklausomai nuo to, kas ir kieno vardu juos skelbia, jei tik r?ksnys pažada masei prisiimti sunki? m?stymo našt? ir atsakomyb? už tai, ko ji bijo, bet negali išvengti.

if you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it'll still grab it because it's in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he'll grab it. It's instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it's only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you can spread dripping on your bread.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

One is sad when one thinks about life—cynical when one -sees what people make of it.

She had no country, Ravic thought. But she did not need one either. She was at home on all ships. She was at home wherever there was courage and conflict and even defeat if it was without despair. She was not only the goddess of victory, she was also the goddess of all adventurers and the goddess of refugees—so long as they did not give up.

I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.

There's something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you're happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary.

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

I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives.

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.

serenity, the calm daughter of tolerance

An hour passes. I sit tensely and watch his every movement in case he may perhaps say something. What if he were to open his mouth and cry out! But he only weeps, his head turned aside. He does not speak of his mother or his brothers and sisters. He says nothing; all that lies behind him; he is entirely alone now with his little life of nineteen years, and cries because it leaves him.

Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay and the war would be over and done in a day.

I tell you this: it is the most despicable thing of all to drag animals into a war.

Sre?a, kad je doživljujemo, nikad nije potpuna. Tek u sje?anju postaje potpuna...

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

Ach, darling, why aren't we rich? We have such marvellous ideas of what to do with it. There are so many rich people who can do no better than go backwards and forwards to their banks and offices. That's why they are rich, of course, said I. If we were rich we certainly wouldn't be so for long.

We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out.

The cries continued. It is not men, they could not cry so terribly. Wounded horses, says Kat. It's unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.

he begins to notice that he has been turned out of the silent company of the trees, the animals, the stars, and the unconscious life.

That is a generation's difference these days," Ferdinand continued. "A lifetime's difference. A thousand years' difference. What do you children understand of existence? You're afraid even of your own feelings. You don't write letters—you telephone; you don't dream—you go for week-end excursions; you are rational in love and irrational in politics—a pitiable race.

A woman who is desired by someone else, even a love-starved coffinmaker, immediately becomes more precious than before. Man, as it happens, lives by relative rather than absolute values.