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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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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
Moment
Moments
Someone
Better
Right
World
Cigarette
Ideals
More quotes by 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
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
It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.
Erich Maria Remarque
We were all at once terribly alone and alone we must see it through.
Erich Maria Remarque
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
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
The war has ruined us for everything.
Erich Maria Remarque
Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.
Erich Maria Remarque
You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.
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
(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
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
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
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
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
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
Good or ill, life is life you only realize that when you have to risk it.
Erich Maria Remarque
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
Erich Maria Remarque
We are little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go out…we creep in upon ourselves and with big eyes stare into the night…and thus we wait for morning.
Erich Maria Remarque
My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
Erich Maria Remarque