Quotes from The Black Obelisk

“Never do anything complicated when something simple will serve as well. It's one of the most important secrets of living.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“То, чего не можешь заполучить, всегда кажется лучше того, что имеешь. В этом и состоит романтика и идиотизм человеческой жизни.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“I cannot really play. Either at piano or at life; never, never have I been able to. I have always been too hasty, too impatient; something always intervenes and breaks it up. But who really knows how to play, and if he does know, what good is it to him? Is the great dark less dark for that, are the unanswerable questions less inscrutable, does the pain of despair at eternal inadequacy burn less fiercely, and can life ever be explained and seized and ridden like a tamed horse or is it always a mighty sail that carries us in the storm and, when we try to seize it, sweep us into the deep? Sometimes there is a hole in me that seems to extend to the center of the earth. What could fill it? Yearning? Dispair? Happiness? What happiness? Fatigue? Resignation? Death? What am I alive for? Yes, for what am I alive?”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“I am a modern man with a strong tendency to self-destruction.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“... but that's what mankind is like: they only prize what they no longer possess.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“I, too, am going to go away soon,' she says, 'I am weary and weary of my weariness. Everything is beginning to be a little empty and full of leave-taking and melancholy and waiting.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“The miracle has passed me by; it has touched but not changed me; I still have the same name and I know I will probably bear it until the end of my days; I am no phoenix; resurrection is not for me; I have tried to fly but I am tumbling like a dazzled, awkward rooster back to earth, back behind the barbed wires.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“No matter how improbable an assertion is, if it is made with enough assurance it has an affect.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each one of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“One often feels as though something had happened before, I remember. It comes quite close to you and stands there and you know it was just this way once before, exactly so; for an instant you almost know how it must go on, but then it disappears as you try to lay hold of it like smoke or a dead memory. "We could never remember, Isabelle," I say. "It's like the rain. That has also become one, out of two gasses, oxygen and hydrogen, which no longer remember they were once gasses. Now they are only rain and have no memory of an earlier time.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“- Нет никакой причины, чтобы бежать, Рудольф, и никакой - чтобы возвращаться. Все двери одинаковы. А за ними... - Ничего. Есть только двери. Всюду только двери, а за ними ничего нет.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Our damnable memory is a sieve. It wants to survive. And survival is only possible through forgetfulness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Искам да си отида; но нещо ме кара да остана. Когато човек може сам да се измъчва, той не пропуска така лесно никой удобен случай.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Здрачът изведнъж се спуска върху прозореца. Забулва го с воал от почти невидима дрезгавина. Всичко е още тук както преди — светлината вън, зеленината, жълтите пътища, двете палми в големите саксии от фаянс, небето с облачните фронтове, далечното, сиво и червено гъмжило от покриви в града, зад горите… И нищо не е вече тук както преди — здрачът го е изолирал, покрил го е с лака на преходността, приготвил го е за храна на вълци на нощта — както домакините приготвят печено с кисел сос. Само Изабел е още тук, вкопчила се в последното въже на светлината, но то вече я въвлича в драмата на вечерта, която никога не е била драма, а е драма само защото знаем, че се нарича преходност. Едва откакто сме узнали, че трябва да умрем, и защото знаем това, идилията се е превърнала в драма, кръгът — в копие, развитието — в упадък, викът — в страх, а бягството — в присъда.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“I am thinking of those strange moments when unexpectedly a kind of second sight like a deceptive memory seems suddenly to give us glimpses of many earlier lives.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Inimene elatub 75 protsenti omaenda fantaasiast ja ainult 25 protsenti faktidest – see on tema tugevus ja tema nõrkus.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Дойде отнякъде, наистина отнякъде - оттам, където границите свършват, където светлината на разума, само че разкривена като някакво развяващо се северно сияние, виси под небеса, които не познават нито ден, нито нощ, а само ехото на собствените си лъчи, ехото на ехото, бледата светлина на отвъдния свят и на пространството без време.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“He was pious... He must... He can’t possibly have remembered that this way he would not be allowed to lie in consecrated earth.”
“He probably didn’t think about it at all. But don’t grieve at what your pastor says. I know thousands of very pious Catholics who lie in unconsecrated earth.”
“Where?”
“On the battlefields in Russia and France. They lie there all together in mass graves, Catholics and Jews and Protestants, and I don’t think it makes a bit of difference to God.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Когато човек се отказва от нещо, няма защо да го губи...”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“What's the matter with you anyway?" Riesenfeld shouts "You look like a moon-struck kangaroo!”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“Where is it, Rudolf?” she whispers, pressing herself against me. “Tell me where it is! Has a piece of me
been left behind everywhere? In all the mirrors I have looked into? I have seen lots of them, countless ones!
Am I scattered everywhere in them? Has each of them taken some part of me? A thin impression, a thin slice
of me? Have I been shaved down by mirrors like a piece of wood by a carpenter’s plane? What is still left of
me?”
I take her by the shoulders. “All of you is still here,” I say. “On-the contrary, mirrors add something. They
make it visible and give it to you—a bit of space, a lighted bit of our-self.”
“Myself?” She continues to cling to my hand. “But suppose it is not that way? Suppose myself is buried all
over in thousands and thousands of mirrors? How can I get it back? Oh, I can never get it back! It is lost!
Lost! It has been rubbed away like a statue that no longer has a face. Where is my face? Where is my first
face? The one before all the mirrors? The one before they began to steal me!”
“No one has stolen you,” I say in desperation. “Mirrors don’t steal. They only reflect.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

“A woman who is desired by someone else, even a love-starved coffinmaker, immediately becomes more precious than before. Man, as it happens, lives by relative rather than absolute values.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Black Obelisk

About the author

Popular quotes

“Childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul.”
― Ivan Doig, quote from The Whistling Season

“Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]
1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey
2. The Old Testament
3. Aeschylus – Tragedies
4. Sophocles – Tragedies
5. Herodotus – Histories
6. Euripides – Tragedies
7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9. Aristophanes – Comedies
10. Plato – Dialogues
11. Aristotle – Works
12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
13. Euclid – Elements
14. Archimedes – Works
15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections
16. Cicero – Works
17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18. Virgil – Works
19. Horace – Works
20. Livy – History of Rome
21. Ovid – Works
22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania
24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion
26. Ptolemy – Almagest
27. Lucian – Works
28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties
30. The New Testament
31. Plotinus – The Enneads
32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
33. The Song of Roland
34. The Nibelungenlied
35. The Saga of Burnt Njál
36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica
37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy
38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly
42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
43. Thomas More – Utopia
44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays
48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis
52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences
54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World
55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals
56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy
58. John Milton – Works
59. Molière – Comedies
60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics
63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education
64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies
65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics
66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology
67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
69. William Congreve – The Way of the World
70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge
71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man
72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws
73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets”
― Mortimer J. Adler, quote from How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. Learning for instance, to eat when he's hungry and sleep when he's sleepy.”
― Jack Kerouac, quote from Lonesome Traveler

“Rebus remembered that the premature withdrawal of the penis during intercourse for contraceptive reasons was often referred to as ‘getting off at Haymarket.”
― Ian Rankin, quote from Knots and Crosses

“was a full-service marina for the terminally rich, the kind of place where they cleaned and polished your bowline when you brought the boat in.”
― Jeff Lindsay, quote from Dexter in the Dark

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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