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...

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

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...

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

From this day forth I placedressmakers above philosophers. Those people bring beautyinto life, and that’s worth a hundred times the most unfathomable meditations.

We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important to us. And good boots are hard to come by.” – All Quiet On The Western...

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

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 best way to lose a woman was to show her a kind of life that one could offer her for only a few days.

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...

There had never been any more between us thanchance had brought. But perhaps that makes a greater indebtednessand binds closer than much else

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.

Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of lif eis limited to death.

Jeigu būtų kur nors pasaulyje tokia vieta, kur tikrai vieną valandą per visus metus būtų galima gauti ką nors valgomo, jis kaip tik šią valandą, tarsi kokio įkvėpimo genamas, užsidėtų kepurę, išeitų, nueitų tiesiai lyg...

Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that...

Strange how complicated we can make things just to avoid showing what we feel!

We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.”...

One always expects something else.

The idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and a more humane wisdom.

It’s not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you’ll find out, when you’ve been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.

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...

Žmogus nesi jau toks svarbus.- Nesvarbus? – Švarcas vėl pakėlė sutrikusį veidą. – Nesvarbus? Žinoma, ne! Bet malonėkite pasakyti man, kas gi tuomet svarbu, jeigu gyvenimas nebesvarbus?- Niekas, – atsakiau žinodamas, kad tai ir teisybė,...

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades – words, words, but they hold the horror of the world.

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...

It’s only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don’t feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that’s what counts. A half-yard away someone’s world...

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...

A miracle is never perfect when it happens, there are always little disappointments. But once it’s gone for good and nothing can change it, memory could make it perfect and then it would never change....

But what I would like to know,” says Albert, “is whether there would not have been a war if the Kaiser had said No.””I’m sure there would,” I interject, “he was against it from the...

Suddenly he knew all the things he should have said.

Our knowledge of life is limited to death

Pasaulis niekada neatrodo toks gražus, kaip tą akimirką, kaii jį paliekame, kai jums atima laisvę

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...

…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.

We’re no longer young men. We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to...

It is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men. They are so much more energetic and compromising than the big fellows.

Love should not be polluted with friendship.

The music enchanted the air. It was like the south wind, like a warm night, like swelling sails beneath the stars, completely and utterly unreal… It made everything spacious and colourful, the dark stream of...

We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

Galimybė nusižudyti yra likimo dovana, kurią mes retai tesuvokiame. Ji suteikia laisvo apsisprendimo iliuziją. Ko gero, mes žudomės kur kas dažniau, negu manome. Tik nejaučiame to.

The first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.

Only the stupid conquer in life; the other man foreseestoo many obstacles and becomes uncertain before he starts.

I soon found out this much:–terror can be endured so long as a man simply ducks;–but it kills, if a man thinks about it.

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...

Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay/And the war would be over and done in a day.” – All Quiet On The Western Front, Ch. 3

A man has to have something he can put faith in.

We were trained in the army for ten weeks and in this time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school. We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer....

Stebuklas, kai jį patiri, niekuomet nėra pilnas, tik atmintis padaro jį tokiu.

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...

Die Bücher habe ich nach und nach gekauft von dem Geld, das ich mir Stundengeben verdiente. Viele davon antiquarisch, alle Klassiker zum Beispiel, ein Band kostete eine Mark und zwanzig Pfennig in steifem, blauem Leinen....