Ernest Hemingway Quotes

The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

All thinking men are atheists.

Courage is grace under pressure.

I drink to make other people more interesting.

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at 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.

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

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.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Never mistake motion for action.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

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.

The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.

There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

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.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

In order to write about life first you must live it.

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.

The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.

If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.

I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started.

Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.

Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.

They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at 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 that it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.

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.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

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.

But did thee feel the earth move?

There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

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.

You'll lose it, if you talk about it

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.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

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.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

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.

In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

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.

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.

I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.

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.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.

For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit?s foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit?s foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by the wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there.

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for

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.

I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends; it was bad for their prose and made them write bad poetry. If you are going to be a great patriot i.e. loyal to any existing order of government (not one who wishes to destroy the existing for something better) you want to be killed early if your life and works won't stink.

No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one.

The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.

The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

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.

The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object

All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.

Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.

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.

Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.

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.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.

I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.