60 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes on Life, Women, Love, and War
Erich Maria Remarque (born 22 June 1898, Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, German Empire – died 25 September 1970, Locarno, Switzerland) was a German novelist. His best known novel Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1928), about German soldiers in the First World War, was made into an Oscar-winning movie.
16 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes About Life
Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.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.He who wants to hold on to that — is losing. Those who are ready to let go with a smile — are trying to keep him.We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!Whatever happens to you, never take it personally. Nothing in this world is so important.Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.What you can't get always seems better than what you have. This includes the romance and idiocy of human life.I feel like I am among people who are going to live forever. At least that is how they act. They are so obsessed with money that they have forgotten about life.
8 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes on Women
If a woman belongs to another man, she is five times more desirable than the one you can easily get.If a woman is angry it means she is not only wrong, but also she knows it.Women do not need to explain anything, you always have to act with them.If a woman saves money on herself, it means that it makes men want to save money on her!Only a complete idiot would argue with a woman and appeal to her logic.A woman becomes smarter when she is in love, whereas a man loses his mind.A woman should not tell a man that she loves him. Let her shining, happy eyes speak about this. They are more eloquent than any words.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.
10 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes on Love
I stood next to her, listened to her, laughed and thought how terrible it is to love a woman and be poor.Only if you finally part with a person, you begin to be truly interested in everything that concerns him. This is one of the paradoxes of love.Being in love — is when you want to get old with someone.What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!Who has many women — knows women. Who has one wife — knows love.No one could become stranger than the person you once loved.Love can’t stand explanations, it requires action.Love wants to be eternal, this is the source of the torture it causes us.Love should not be polluted with friendship.
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
7 Erich Maria Remarque Quotes on War
A hospital alone shows what war is.You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.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.Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.
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
We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.
Erich Maria Remarque
19 Wise Erich Maria Remarque Quotes That Make You Think
It is a mistake to assume that all people have the same ability to feel.There is nothing more tiring than to attend how a person demonstrates his mind. In particular, if there is no mind.A person can become close to you in three days. And the one who lives near you for years, may never know what your favorite color is.At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.Our knowledge of life is limited to death.Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.The things men did or felt they had to do.Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them. Not always sorry for the one who is wrong. Asking forgiveness of the one who values the relations.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.Anything you can settle with money is cheap.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.A friend standing behind is worse than an enemy standing in front.Life is a disease, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying - a little shove toward the end.We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It’s one of the most important secrets of living.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.If a man is not married at 30, it means that he has not been forced to get married yet. Men don't get married because they want to get married, but because women want to get married.A man only begins to be valued when he is no longer there.
