Quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

“A hospital alone shows what war is.”

A crude age. Peace is stabilized with cannon and bombers, humanity with concentration camps and pogroms. Were 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 are the troublemakers of the world. Whats more, there are whole races who believe it!

Today the aggressor is the shepherd of peace, and the beaten and hunted are the troublemakers of the world. Whats more, there are whole races who believe it!

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-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

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.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

Petnaest srećnih godina su kratke - odgovorih. Petnaest nesrećnih godina su duge i pružaju čoveku mnogo iskustva.

Its only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

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.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Может быть, у смерти совсем другое имя. Мы ведь видим ее всегда только с одной стороны. Может быть, смерть - это совершенная любовь между нами и Богом.

Its not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But youll find out, when youve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you dont feel the pain. Your belly is whole and thats what counts. A half-yard away someones world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. Thats the misery of the world.

We dont act like that because we are in good humor we are in a good humor because otherwise we should go to pieces.

Love should not be polluted with friendship.

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.

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?

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

How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.

We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasnt the most important thing...not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us.