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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

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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
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Mirrors
Giving
Image
Never
Behinds
Behind
Shall
Alone
Give
Anything

More quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

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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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A hospital alone shows what war is.
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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Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!
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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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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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
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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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Good or ill, life is life you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
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The things men did or felt they had to do.
Erich Maria Remarque
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Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.
Erich Maria Remarque
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We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world and we had to shoot it to pieces.
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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Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
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I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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.
Erich Maria Remarque
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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
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I felt the first soft glow of intoxication that makes the blood warmer and spreads an illusion of adventure over uncertainty.
Erich Maria Remarque