Ernest Hemingway famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Relationship #Peace

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Life #Happiness #Silly

Courage is grace under pressure.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Inspirational #Positive #Courage

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Relationship #Trust #Boyfriend

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

#Sports #Real #Fighting

Never mistake motion for action.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Positive #Witty #Mistake

To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Hurt #Bad Ass #Hell

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Inspirational #Leadership #Wise

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Inspirational #Life #Strength

I drink to make other people more interesting.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Funny #Life #Drinking

we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Love #Romantic #Stars

I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Broken #Brave #Darling

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

#Feel Good #Morality #Housekeeping

Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Beautiful #Sleep #Laughing

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Funny #Witty #Clever

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Simple #Breathing #Cities

After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Writing #Stories #Empty

Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Birthday #Risk #Age

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Lonely #Writing #Lonely Life

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

#Drinking #Book #Beer

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

#Beauty #Courage #Honesty

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Falling In Love #Fall #Mean

I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Hate #Body #Cramps

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Notebook #Paris #Waiting

There is no night life in Spain. They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day. Night life is when you get up with a hangover in the morning. Night life is when everybody says what the hell and you do not remember who paid the bill. Night life goes round and round and you look at the wall to make it stop. Night life comes out of a bottle and goes into a jar. If you think how much are the drinks it is not night life.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Morning #Wall #Hangover

I am thee and thou art me and all of one is the other.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Art #Thee

I have a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Rotten #Bedroom #Habit

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Writing #People #Enough

You won't do our things with another girl, or say the same things, will you?
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Girl

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

#Military #War #Men

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

#Life #Cheating #Writing

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

#Courage #Strong #People

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Farewell #Writing #Fifty

No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Cat #Animal #Liberty

Wine ... offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than possibly any other purely sensory thing which may be purchased.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Appreciation #Wine #May

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

#Death #Art #Honor

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

#Country #Sweet #Dog

A bottle of wine was good company.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Wine #Bottles #Good Company

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

#Butterfly #Wings #Dust

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

#Writing #Events #Assuming

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Girl #Rain #Cutting

All thinking men are atheists.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Inspirational #Death #Atheist

The sinews of war are five - men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#War #Men #Maintenance

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

#Lonely #Loneliness #Night

As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Long #Juice

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Paris #London #Riddle

The first draft of anything is sh*t.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Creativity #Firsts

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

#Writing #Thinking #Doe

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Feelings #Trying #Stories

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Book #New Beginnings #Trying

Dying is a very simple thing. I've looked at death and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did. But the people at home do not realize that. They suffer a thousand times more.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Death #Home #Simple

You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Development #Cases #Moron

No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Grace #Stories #Pressure

You’re my religion. You’re all I’ve got.
-- Ernest Hemingway

I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can’t believe in it. Things aren’t that way.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Beautiful #Believe #Feelings

A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists, all powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Beautiful #Death #Powerful

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

#Finals #World #Lasts

What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Dog #Writing #Differences

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

#Life #Soil #Grades

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Journey #Thinking #Hiking

Anyone can be a fisherman in May.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#May #Fisherman

You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#I Hate You #Brave #Suffering

The best writing is certainly when you are in love
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Writing

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Observation #Observing

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

#Book #Usa #Literature

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

#Powerful #Spring #Writing

Writing and travel broaden your ***** if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Travel #Writing #Mind

Man is not made for defeat.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Perseverance #Self Esteem #Men

Never confuse movement with action.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Inspirational #Funny #Work

War is not won by victory.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#War #Victory

Develop a built-in bullshit detector.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Bad Ass #Bullshit #Ass

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

#Writing #Done #Letters

I don’t. I don’t want anybody else to touch you. I’m silly. I get furious if they touch you.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Silly #Want #Furious

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

#Fitness #Order #Healthy

I'm with you. No matter what else you have in your head I'm with you and I love you.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Love You #Matter

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Light #Age #Body

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

#Writing #Rocks #Literature

Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#New Day #Luck #Lucky

I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Sorry #Love You #Useless

Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Men #Old Man

I am so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Love You

My big fish must be somewhere.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Big Fish #Bigs #Old Man

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Cheer #Book #Writing

But life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Life #Nothing To Lose #Manage

The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Men #Wind #Sea

Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Thinking #Waiting #Trying

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

#Death #Writing #Stories

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

#Way #Invention #Inventor

Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#World #Want #Made

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Life #Fun #Bad Ass

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

#Death #Hate #Fighting

Easy writing makes hard reading.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Reading #Writing #Easy

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Writing #Water #Feelings

When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. . . .When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have e made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Hurt #Morning #Book

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Farewell #Writing #Arms

There isn't any me. I'm you. Don't make up a separate me.
-- 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

#Good Luck #Writing #Long

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

#Writing #Water #May

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Men #Battle #Watches

The shortest answer is doing the thing.
-- Ernest Hemingway

#Answers #Literature #Action