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"Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!"
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"I tell you as well as myself: what we see with our own eyes is nothing other than a cloud concealing what we should perceive with our inner sight, while what we listen to with our ears is merely a ringing sound disturbing what we should understand with our hearts. When we see a man being taken to prion by a police officer let us not hasten to assume he is a wrong-doer. When we see a corpse, and a man standing beside it with bloodstained hands, let us not conclude that this is a victim and his assassin. When we hear one man singing and another lamenting, let us ascertain which one of the two is truly happy."

"People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so."

"People of Berlin - people of the world - this is our moment. This is our time."

"To all apparent beauties blind, each blemish strikes an envious mind."

"I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things."

"Say, there is a book written by Tolstoy sitting right there on the table. To our unique human consciousness, the reality of the papers in the book, is infinitely different from the valuable literature that they possess. For the kind of consciousness possessed by the bug which eats those papers, literature is non-existent, yet for the Human Consciousness, literature has a greater value of truth than the papers themselves."

"It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk."

"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
Explore more quotes by Erich Maria Remarque

"The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off."

"What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing."

"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."

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

"We were never very demonstrative in our family; poor folk who toil and are full of cares are not so. It is not their way to protest what they already know. When my mother says to me 'dear boy,' it means much more than when another uses it."

"Below there are cyclists, lorries, men; it is a grey street and a grey subway;-it affects me as though it were my mother."

"Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy."
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