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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

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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
Thing
System
Realising
Good
Came
Apparently
Freedom
Bitterness
Drill
Ideas
Indifference
Drills
Firsts
Enthusiasm
Astonishment
Everything
Intellect
Joined
First
Finally
Realise
Important
Wasn
Knock

More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

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It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.
Erich Maria Remarque
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The war has ruined us for everything.
Erich Maria Remarque
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I am no longer a shuddering speck of existence, alone in the darkness--I belong to them and they to me we all share the same fear and the same life...I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.
Erich Maria Remarque
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It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hour's bombardment unscratched. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
Erich Maria Remarque
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We want to live at any price so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Good or ill, life is life you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
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(Ravic speaking of a butterfly caught in the Louvre) In the morning it would search for flowers and life and the light honey of blossoms and would not find them and later it would fall asleep on millennial marble, weakened by then, until the grip of the delicate, tenacious feet loosened and it fell, a thin leaf of premature autumn.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
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The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it
Erich Maria Remarque
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The wisest were just the poor and simple people. They knew the war to be a misfortune, whereas those who were better off, and should have been able to see more clearly what the consequences would be, were beside themselves with joy.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day. - All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3
Erich Maria Remarque
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Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
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The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.
Erich Maria Remarque
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On the steps is a machine-gun ready for action. The square is empty only the streets that lead into it are jammed with people. It would be madness to go farther - the machine-gun is covering the square.
Erich Maria Remarque
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My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
Erich Maria Remarque
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It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
Erich Maria Remarque