Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.

Courage is the fairest adornment of youth.

They are more to me than life, these voices, they are more than motherliness and more than fear; they are the strongest, most comforting thing there is anywhere: they are the voices of my comrades.

But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?

With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.