Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics40 Best Quotes by Erich Maria Remarque You Will Love

Remarque Quote Erich Maria Remarque was one of the most outstanding German novelists. His birthday was on June 22nd, and we decided to celebrate it with this collection of his pearls of wisdom. The quotes by Erich Maria Remarque are a great cure for your soul and an amazing source of inspiration.

  1. “It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.”
  2. “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.”
  3. “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.”
  4. “To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There’s much too little forgetting.”
  5. “Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”
  6. “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.”
  7. “I’ve not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.”
  8. “It’s no shame to be born stupid. Only to die stupid.”
  9. “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.”
  10. “Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”
  11. “Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!”
  12. “I want to think and at the same time that’s the last thing in the world I want to do.”
  13. “we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
  14. “Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.”
  15. “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.”
  16. “Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It’s one of the most important secrets of living.”
  17. “Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”
  18. “No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.”
  19. “Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
  20. “We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.”
  21. “… clothes sometimes gave one more of a lift than any philosophic comforting.”
  22. “Heaven has no favorites.”
  23. “All quiet on the Western front.”
  24. “Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.”
  25. “What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!”
  26. “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.”
  27. “… but that’s what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer posses.”
  28. “Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.”
  29. “It is too dangerous for me to put these things into words. I am afraid they might then become gigantic and I be no longer able to master them.”
  30. “The more primitive a man is the better he believes himself to be.”
  31. “Love should not be polluted with friendship.”
  32. “State and home country, there’s a difference.”
  33. “Human beings are a much worse poison than schnapps or tobacco.”
  34. “Love, he thought. That too is love. The old miracle. It not only casts a rainbow of dreams against the gray sky of facts—it also sheds romantic light upon a heap of dung—a miracle and a mad mockery. Suddenly he had the strange feeling of having become, in a remote way, an accomplice.”
  35. “A man has to have something he can put faith in.”
  36. “One is sad when one thinks about life—cynical when one -sees what people make of it.”
  37. “I always thought everyone was against war until I found out there are those who are all for it, especially those who do not have to go there.”
  38. “Ach, darling, why aren’t we rich? We have such marvellous ideas of what to do with it. There are so many rich people who can do no better than go backwards and forwards to their banks and offices.”
    “That’s why they are rich, of course,” said I. “If we were rich we certainly wouldn’t be so for long”.
  39. “…and without love, one is a dead man on furlough, nothing but a scrap of paper with a few dates and a chance name on it, and we as well die.”
  40. “Love is not a businessman who wants to see a return on his investments. And imagination needs only a few nails on which to hang its veil. Whether they are of gold, tin, or covered with rust makes no difference to it. Wherever it gets caught, it is caught.”

Do you have your personal favorite quote by Remarque? Or, have you chosen something from this list?

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