These All Quiet on the Western Front quotes explore themes of war, death, and the futility of war.
Discover how Remarque poetically and poignantly depicts the experience of WWI in this classic work of literature.
All Quiet on the Western Front Quotes With Page Numbers
“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Page 0
“It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 10
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 11
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 12
“The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 12
“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 13
“… We had suddenly learned to see. And we saw that there was nothing of their world left. We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 1, Page 13
“We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 2, Page 20
“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.”
“We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer. At first astonished, then embittered, and finally indifferent, we recognised that what matters is not the mind but the boot brush, not intelligence but the system, not freedom but drill. We became soldiers with eagerness and enthusiasm, but they have done everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it was no longer incomprehensible to us “
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 2, Pages 21, 22
“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 3, Page 40
“Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting”
~Enrich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 3, Page 41
“To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, to run, ten seconds of life; receives him again and again and often forever.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 4, Page 55
“Beside us lies a fair-headed recruit in utter terror. He has buried his face in his hands, his helmet has fallen off. I fish hold of it and try to put it back on his head. He looks up, pushes the helmet off and like a child creeps under my arm, his head close to my breast. The little shoulders heave. Shoulders just like Kemmerich’s. I let him be.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 4, Page 61
“The coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 4, Page 67
“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.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 5, Page 85
“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 5, Pages 87, 88
“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 5, Pages 87, 88
“We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 5, Pages 87, 88
“I love him, his shoulders, his angular, stooping figure – and at the same time I see behind him woods and stars, and a clear voice utters words that bring me peace, to me, a soldier in big boots, belt, and a knapsack, taking the road that lies before him under the high heaven, quickly forgetting and seldom sorrowful, for ever pressing on under the wide night sky.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 5, Page 95
“No soldier outlives a thousand chances.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 6, Page 101
“And even if these scenes from our youth were given back to us we would hardly know what to do. The tender, secret influence that passed from them into us could not rise again. We might be amongst them and move in them; we might remember and love them and be stirred by the sight of them. But it would be like gazing at the photograph of a dead comrade; those are his features, it is his face, and the days we spent together take on a mournful life in the memory; but the man himself it is not.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 6, Page 122
“We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 6, Page 123
“Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 6, Page 132
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 140
“The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:—against whom, against whom?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 140
“I lie down on many a station platform; I stand before many a soup kitchen; I squat on many a bench;–then at last the landscape becomes disturbing, mysterious, and familiar. It glides past the western windows with its villages, their thatched roofs like caps, pulled over the white-washed, half-timbered houses, its corn-fields, gleaming like mother-of-pearl in the slanting light, its orchards, its barns and old lime trees.
The names of the stations begin to take on meaning and my heart trembles. The train stamps and stamps onward. I stand at the window and hold on to the frame. These names mark the boundaries of my youth.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 154
“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.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 165
“This is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes that is it – they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being taken up by with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole essence;”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Pages 168, 169
“I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books. The breath of desire that then arose from the coloured backs of the books, shall fill me again, melt the heavy, dead lump of lead that lies somewhere in me and waken again the impatience of the future, the quick joy in the world of thought, it shall bring back again the lost eagerness of my youth. I sit and wait.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 171
“What is leave? – a pause that only makes everything after it so much worse.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 179
“We have so much to say, and we shall never say it.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7, Page 184
“I think it is more of a kind of fever,” says Albert. “No one in particular wants it, and then all at once there it is. We didn’t want the war, the others say the same thing–and yet half the world is in it all the same.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 206
“They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 212
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 212
“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, we are nearer than lovers, in a simpler, a harder way; I could bury my face in them, in these voices, these words that have saved me and will stand by me.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 212
“Comrade, I did not want to kill you. . . . But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. . . . I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. 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?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 223
“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?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 223
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. 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?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 223
“The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and say to him: “Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you are only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth it appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are just 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? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of my life, comrade, and stand up — take more, for I do not know what I can even attempt to do with it now.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 9, Page 223
“A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one hospital, a single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia. 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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 263
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 263
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 263
“I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;—it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 263
“Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 263
“Our knowledge of life is limited to death”
~Enrich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 10, Page 264
“Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the days;–when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead. Fields of craters within and without.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 11, Page 271
“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, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 11, Pages 274, 275
“What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 11, Page 284
“And men will not understand us—for the generation that grew up before us, though it has passed these years with us already had a home and a calling; now it will return to its old occupations, and the war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will be strange to us and push us aside. We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;—the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 12, Page 294
“He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front. He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.”
~Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, Page 296 (Last page)
All Quiet On the Western Front Summary
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque that follows the story of a group of German soldiers during World War I.
The protagonist, Paul Baumer, is a young man sent to the front lines along with his friends. Through their experiences on the front, they witness war’s horror, violence, and destruction.
The novel examines the psychological effects of war on these young men as they struggle to maintain their humanity and sanity amid such terror.
The novel also serves as a reminder of the senselessness of war and the need to remember those who died in it. Ultimately, the novel conveys a powerful message about the futility of war and the importance of peace.