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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Erich Maria Remarque
Age: 72 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 22
Died: 1970
Died: September 25
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Erich Paul Remark
Erich Maria Remark
Turns
Button
Everyone
Buttons
May
Criminal
Criminals
Sees
Missing
Fool
Turn
Archangel
More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque
The war has ruined us for everything.
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. - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 5
Erich Maria Remarque
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers - we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals.
Erich Maria Remarque
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
We came to realise - first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference - that intellect apparently wasn't 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.
Erich Maria Remarque
Sweet dreams though the guns are booming.
Erich Maria Remarque
-Why does a man live? -In order to think about it.
Erich Maria Remarque
The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque
It's all rot that they put in the war-news about the good humour of the troops, how they are arranging dances almost before they are out of the front-line. We don't act like that because we are in a good humour: we are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.
Erich Maria Remarque
The things men did or felt they had to do.
Erich Maria Remarque
Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
Erich Maria Remarque
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.
Erich Maria Remarque