Erich Maria Remarque: Citáty anglicky (strana 2)

“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.”

“Nothing is the mirror in which you see the world.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.”

“Why does a man live?
-In order to think about it…”

“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.”

“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”

“Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

“It was a melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them.”

“Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.”

“I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.”

“At school nobody ever taught us how to light a cigarette in a storm of rain, nor how a fire could be made with wet wood-nor that it is best to stick a bayonet in the belly because there it doesn't get jammed, as it does in the ribs.”

“No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.”

“Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.”

“Come let me kiss you. Life was never so precious as today— when it meant so little.”

“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.”