“Our knowledge of life is limited to death”

— Erich Maria Remarque, book All Quiet on the Western Front

Source: All Quiet on the Western Front

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our knowledge of life is limited to death" by Erich Maria Remarque?

Erich Maria Remarque63

German novelist 1898–1970

Related quotes

“In the presence of the total reality upon which our conduct is founded, our knowledge is characterized by peculiar limitations and aberrations. We cannot say in principle that "error is life and knowledge is death," because a being involved in persistent errors would continually act wide of the purpose, and would thus inevitably perish.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies (1906), p. 444

“Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”

Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) Colombian writer

“The view from complexity claims that we cannot know complex things completely… modest positions are inescapable… We can increase the knowledge we have of a certain [complex] system, but this knowledge is limited… The fact that our knowledge is limited is not a disaster, it is a condition for knowledge. Limits enable knowledge.”

Paul Cilliers (1956–2011) South African philosopher

Paul Cilliers (2005: 263) as quoted in: Vikki Bell (2007) Culture and Performance: The Challenge of Ethics, Politics and Feminist Theory. p. 8

“Life is only error,
And death is knowledge.”

Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright

Cassandra (1802)

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

6.4311
Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.