Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

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

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

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.

Anything you can settle with money is cheap.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

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

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

To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

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.

Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

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.

Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.

No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.

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.

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

For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.

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.

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.

But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

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.

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.