“We are the change we have been waiting for.”
“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”
“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”
"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”
As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3
“Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out.”
Variant: Science advances one funeral at a time.
“No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.”
Max Müller, as quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood
Misattributed
“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”
196
The Symposium
“Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.”
Source: The Black Obelisk
“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
“The death of one man is a just death, the death of two millions is a statistic.”
Aber das ist wohl so, weil ein einzelner immer der Tod ist — und zwei Millionen immer nur eine Statistik.
Der schwarze Obelisk (1956)
A variant of this quote "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic." has also been attributed to Joseph Stalin, but no source for this has been found. This version appeared in the English press not later than 1958. (Ремарк, Эрих Мария // Словарь современных цитат / составитель К. В. Душенко — Москва: изд-во «Эксмо», 2006)
“It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit.”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Ch. 6
Context: It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dugout I might have been smashed to atoms, and in the open survive ten hours' bombardment unscathed. No soldier survives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
“We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.”
Source: All Quiet on the Western Front
“Life did not intend to make us perfect. Whoever is perfect belongs in a museum.”
