Erich Maria Remarque Quotes

Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation

If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me.

'Ikiru' is existential but with a lot of tenderness.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

The meaning of life is life.

I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination?

The absurd depends as much on man as on the world. For the moment, it is all that links them together.

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.

I'm a card-carrying existentialist.

What's the point of our life? Everything seems absurd until we die, and then it makes sense.

The greatest sin is to miss the point of human existence.

Existence is not a mystery unless you think it has a meaning.

it seems a silly kind o' business to bring us into the world at all for no special reason 'cept to take us out of it again just as folks 'ave learned to know us a bit and find us useful.

It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

I like to think that death gives life meaning. I like that philosophy.

We all die at the end, but does that nullify everything? Would most people rather say, "I wish I hadn't been born?" Once you're born you'll have to die, now is that funny or sad?

Life belongs to man, but the meaning of life is beyond him.

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.

I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!

If life is so meaningless, then why are we always bringing it up?

It seems that it is impossible to live without discovering the purpose of your life. And the first thing which a person should do is to understand the meaning of life. But the majority of people who consider themselves to be educated are proud that they have reached such great height that they cease to care about the meaning of existence.

How can we live and die and never know the difference?

You don't waste your entire life waiting to go back to dust.

Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that's what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.