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Quotes by Ernest Hemingway


There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
– Ernest Hemingway
A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
– Ernest Hemingway
All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
– Ernest Hemingway
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
– Ernest Hemingway
All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
– Ernest Hemingway
All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
– Ernest Hemingway
All things truly wicked start from innocence.
– Ernest Hemingway
An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
– Ernest Hemingway
As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
– Ernest Hemingway
Courage is grace under pressure.
– Ernest Hemingway
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
– Ernest Hemingway
Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.
– Ernest Hemingway
Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object.
– Ernest Hemingway
Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
– Ernest Hemingway
For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
– Ernest Hemingway
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
– Ernest Hemingway
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.
– Ernest Hemingway
God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp followers.
– Ernest Hemingway
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
– Ernest Hemingway
Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
– Ernest Hemingway
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.
– Ernest Hemingway
I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.
– Ernest Hemingway
I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
– Ernest Hemingway
I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
– Ernest Hemingway
I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes.
– Ernest Hemingway
I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
– Ernest Hemingway
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
– Ernest Hemingway
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
– Ernest Hemingway
I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me.
– Ernest Hemingway
I wish I could write well enough to write about aircraft. Faulkner did it very well in Pylon but you cannot do something someone else has done though you might have done it if they hadn't.
– Ernest Hemingway
I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
– Ernest Hemingway
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.
– Ernest Hemingway
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
– Ernest Hemingway
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
– Ernest Hemingway
If you have a success you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.
– Ernest Hemingway
In Europe we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary.
– Ernest Hemingway
In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
– Ernest Hemingway
Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.
– Ernest Hemingway
Man is not made for defeat.
– Ernest Hemingway
My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
– Ernest Hemingway
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
– Ernest Hemingway
Never mistake motion for action.
– Ernest Hemingway
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.
– Ernest Hemingway
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
– Ernest Hemingway
Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, What will you have, sir? And I said, A glass of hemlock.
– Ernest Hemingway
Or don't you like to write letters. I do because it's such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you've done something.
– Ernest Hemingway
Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat - no matter who killed the meat for him.
– Ernest Hemingway
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
– Ernest Hemingway
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.
– Ernest Hemingway
That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best - make it all up - but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.
– Ernest Hemingway
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
– Ernest Hemingway
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
– Ernest Hemingway
The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
– Ernest Hemingway
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after.
– Ernest Hemingway
The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.
– Ernest Hemingway
The shortest answer is doing the thing.
– Ernest Hemingway
The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
– Ernest Hemingway
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are simple things, and because it takes a man's life to know them, the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.
– Ernest Hemingway
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
– Ernest Hemingway
There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
– Ernest Hemingway
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
– Ernest Hemingway
This wine is too good for toast-drinking, my dear. You don't want to mix emotions up with a wine like that. You lose the taste.
– Ernest Hemingway
To be a successful father... there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years.
– Ernest Hemingway
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
– Ernest Hemingway
When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.
– Ernest Hemingway
When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.
– Ernest Hemingway
Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?
– Ernest Hemingway
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
– Ernest Hemingway
You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.
– Ernest Hemingway
You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
– Ernest Hemingway
You're beautiful, like a May fly.
– Ernest Hemingway
It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write.
– Ernest Hemingway
Never confuse movement with action.
– Ernest Hemingway
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
– Ernest Hemingway
For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
– Ernest Hemingway
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
– Ernest Hemingway
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
– Ernest Hemingway
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
– Ernest Hemingway
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
– Ernest Hemingway
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
– Ernest Hemingway
Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
– Ernest Hemingway
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
– Ernest Hemingway
Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it.
– Ernest Hemingway
Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
– Ernest Hemingway
About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
– Ernest Hemingway
A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
– Ernest Hemingway