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Exlpore more Choice quotes

"As Charles Lamb says there is nothing so nice as doing good by stealth and being found out by accident so I now say it is even nicer to make heroic decisions and to be prevented by 'circumstances beyond your control' from ever trying to execute them."

"It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it."

"There's no need to blame fate or destiny for a stupid decision."

"There were always choices. I'd made a string of bad ones myself. At least I could admit that."

"We each possess the capacity for self-development. We also possess the capacity for self-destruction. The path that we chose to take " to pursue lightness or darkness " is the story that we take to our graves."

"We see that happiness is not comfort. Happiness is the freedom to choose one's own way."

"We live by choice and by necessity. We choose the mechanisms that are essential to ensure satisfaction of our baseline survival. What labor we willingly endure in order to meet our minimalistic subsistence requirements and what activities we elect to pursue in order to mollify our desire for living joyfully and attain self-realization defines our essential self's core personality."
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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