Best Quotes by Ernest Hemingway (Top 10)
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There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Ernest Hemingway
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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway
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Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Ernest Hemingway
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The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
Ernest Hemingway
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Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway
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The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway
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The first draft of anything is sh*t.
Ernest Hemingway
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All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest Hemingway
More Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much, and forgetting that you are special too.
Ernest Hemingway
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When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway
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All thinking men are atheists.
Ernest Hemingway
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Courage is grace under pressure.
Ernest Hemingway
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I drink to make other people more interesting.
Ernest Hemingway
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Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
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Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway
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A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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There's no one thing that is true. They're all true.
Ernest Hemingway
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My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.
Ernest Hemingway
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It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ernest Hemingway
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Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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In order to write about life first you must live it.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.
Ernest Hemingway
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All things truly wicked start from innocence.
Ernest Hemingway
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If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Let him think that I am more man than I am and I will be so.
Ernest Hemingway
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It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.
Ernest Hemingway
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All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway
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I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Ernest Hemingway
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The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.
Ernest Hemingway
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As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
Ernest Hemingway
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A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any many could have.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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But did thee feel the earth move?
Ernest Hemingway
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There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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You'll lose it, if you talk about it
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway
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For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
Ernest Hemingway
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I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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The world is a fine place and worth fighting for
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits.
Ernest Hemingway
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The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.
Ernest Hemingway
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I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true.
Ernest Hemingway
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The shortest answer is doing the thing.
Ernest Hemingway
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Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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Defense is the stronger form with the negative object, and attack the weaker form with the positive object
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway
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Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports... all the others are games.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.
Ernest Hemingway
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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
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Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway
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The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
Ernest Hemingway
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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.
Ernest Hemingway