Life & Wisdom Quote by Erich Maria Remarque

Survival, Remarque suggests, isn’t heroic; it’s administrative. “We want to live at any price” lands like a confession stripped of romance, the kind that embarrasses peacetime morality. The line doesn’t plead for sympathy. It coldly inventories what war demands: not just blood, but the deliberate shedding of inner life that civilians treat as character.

The cunning pivot is “feelings” recast as “ornamental.” Remarque is attacking the sentimental myths that nations sell to make slaughter narratively tolerable. In a trench, tenderness, nostalgia, even idealism become decor - fragile objects that snag on barbed wire. Calling them “ornamental” also implicates the home front: those feelings are luxuries curated in safety, then projected onto soldiers as proof of virtue. War doesn’t merely kill bodies; it humiliates the very categories by which a person once understood themselves.

The subtext is a bleak bargain. To keep breathing, you practice a kind of emotional triage: amputate empathy before it gets infected by grief, numb yourself before fear paralyzes you, flatten your conscience before it collapses under what you’ve done or watched. “Out of place here” is the most damning phrase; it turns the battlefield into an alternate social universe with its own logic, where decency becomes impractical.

Context matters: Remarque wrote in the shadow of World War I, when Europe was saturated with commemorative rhetoric and nationalist self-justification. His intent is to puncture that rhetoric by showing the psychological cost of “living at any price”: you survive, but you also return altered, carrying a private peace-time incompatibility that no parade can fix.