Famous Ernest Hemingway Quotations

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"I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Never mistake motion for action."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Never confuse movement with action."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"There's no one thing that is true. They're all true."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Somebody just back of you while you are fishing is as bad as someone looking over your shoulder while you write a letter to your girl."
by Ernest Hemingway
"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age."
by Ernest Hemingway
"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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."
by Ernest Hemingway
"'We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood."
by Ernest Hemingway
"'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part."
by Ernest Hemingway
"[What is the definition of guts?] Grace under pressure."
by Ernest Hemingway
"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
by Ernest Hemingway
"A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
by Ernest Hemingway
"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened."
by Ernest Hemingway
"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
by Ernest Hemingway
"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
by Ernest Hemingway
"All things truly wicked start from innocence."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut"
by Ernest Hemingway
"America is the land of wide lawns and narrow minds."
by Ernest Hemingway
"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
by Ernest Hemingway
"As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports. . . all others are games."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Be fully in the moment,open yourself to the powerful energies dancing around you."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Before we take to the sea, we walk on land. . . Before we create, we must understand. . ."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"But in modern war you will die like a dog for no good reason."
by Ernest Hemingway
"But did thee feel the earth move?"
by Ernest Hemingway
"But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Courage is grace under pressure."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Courage is grace under pressure"
by 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."
by 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"
by Ernest Hemingway
"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.' I agree with the second part"
by Morgan Freeman
"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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Grace under Pressure."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know"
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Humility is not disgraceful, and carries no loss of true pride."
by 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."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after."
by Ernest Hemingway
"I know now that there is no one thing that is true - it is all true."
by Ernest Hemingway
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know? by"
by Ernest Hemingway
"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"
by Ernest Hemingway
"I never had to choose a subject - my subject rather chose me."
by Ernest Hemingway
"I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"In order to write about life, first you must live it!"
by Ernest Hemingway
"It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Let him think I am more man that I am and I will be so."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Live life to the fullest."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Man is not made for defeat."
by Ernest Hemingway
"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
by Ernest Hemingway
"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way"
by Ernest Hemingway
"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin."
by Ernest Hemingway
"Real seriousness in regard to writing is one of two absolute necessities. The other, unfortunately, is talent."
by Ernest Hemingway
"So far, 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"So far, 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"
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone."
by 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."
by 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."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The man who has begun to live more seriously within begins to live more simply without."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits."
by Ernest Hemingway
"The shortest answer is doing the thing."
by Ernest Hemingway


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