Ernest Hemingway Quotes

501 Quotes for Timeless Wisdom on Love, Happiness, and Writing

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”

“Cowards die a thousand deaths, but the brave only die once.”

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

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

“you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.”

“When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”

“Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.”

“After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.”

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

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

“He liked the works of his friends, which is beautiful as loyalty but can be disastrous as judgement.”

“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 the very simplest 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.”

“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.”

“Never confuse movement with action.”

“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.”

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

“You are so brave and quiet I forget you are suffering.”

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!”

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

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

“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.”

“All thinking men are atheists.”

“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”

“There's no one thing that's true. It's all true.”

“There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.”

“Don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you're not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you've lived nearly half the time you have to live already?”

“Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?”

“Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.”

“I am always in love.”

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

“We are all broken—that’s how the light gets in.”

“To hell with them. Nothing hurts if you don't let it.”

“Never fall in love?"
"Always," said the count. "I am always in love.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Listen Jake… don't you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you are not taking advantage of it?”

“What you tell me about in the nights. That is not love. That is only passion and lust. When you love you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”

“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.”

“They [the best of the Masai] had that attitude that makes brothers, that unexpressed but instant and complete acceptance that you must be Masai wherever it is you come from. That attitude you only get from the best of the English, the best of the Hungarians and the very best Spaniards; the thing that used to be the most clear distinction of nobility when there was nobility. It is an ignorant attitude and the people who have it do not survive, but very few pleasanter things ever happen to you than the encountering of it.”

“In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.”

“But life is a cheap thing beside a man's work. The only thing is that you need it.”

“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.”

“What happens to people that love each other?'
'I suppose they have whatever they have and they are more fortunate than others. Then one of them gets the emptiness for ever.”

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.”

“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 it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

“Maybe… you'll fall in love with me all over again."
"Hell," I said, "I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?"
"Yes. I want to ruin you."
"Good," I said. "That's what I want too.”

“But man is not made for defeat... a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

“The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

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

“I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.”

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

“And you'll always love me won't you?
Yes
And the rain won't make any difference?
No”

“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.”

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

“Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.”