30+ Best All Quiet On The Western Front Quotes: Exclusive Selection

All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers’ extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front. Profoundly inspirational All Quiet On The Western Front quotes will challenge the way you think, and help guide you through any life experience.

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Famous All Quiet On The Western Front Quotes

All … other considerations, … are artificial. Only the facts are real and important for us. — Bäumer

To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself. — All Quiet On The Western Front

You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well. — All Quiet On The Western Front

One could sit like this forever. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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 Front

The leader of our group, shrewd, cunning, and hard-bitten, forty years of age, with a face of the soil, blue eyes, bent shoulders, and a remarkable nose for dirty weather, good food, and soft jobs. — All Quiet On The Western Front

Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus Katczinsky has died. Then I know nothing more. — All Quiet On The Western Front

Mighty fine fireworks, if they weren’t so dangerous. — Katczinsky

I will come back again! I will come back again! — All Quiet On The Western Front

We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. — Bäumer

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language. — All Quiet On The Western Front

The war will be forgotten—and the generation that has grown up after us will … push us aside. — Bäumer

Formerly we should not have had a single thought in common—now we … are so intimate that we do not even speak. — Bäumer

Trenches, hospitals, the common grave — there are no other possibilities. — All Quiet On The Western Front

That is Kat. If for one hour in a year something eatable were to be had in some one place only, within that hour, as if moved by a vision, he would put on his cap, go out and walk directly there, as though following a compass, and find it. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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. — All Quiet On The Western Front

The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. — Katczinsky

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. Katczinsky said that was a result of their upbringing. It made them stupid. And what Kat said, he had thought about. — All Quiet On The Western Front

We are here to protect our fatherland. And the French are over there to protect their fatherland. Now who’s in the right? — Kropp

Armoured they come rolling on … more than anything else embody for us the horror of the war. — Bäumer

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. — All Quiet On The Western Front

We distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learned to see. — Bäumer

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. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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

Bombardment, barrage, curtain-fire, mines, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades — words, words, words, but they hold the horror of the world. — All Quiet On The Western Front

Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? That is long ago. We are old folk. — All Quiet On The Western Front

There is a distance, a veil between us. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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 has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Whether I have subdued it, I know not. But so long as it is there it will seek its own way out, heedless of the will that is within me. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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. — All Quiet On The Western Front

He fell in October , 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. — All Quiet On The Western Front

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? — All Quiet On The Western Front