Ernest Hemingway: Trending quotes

“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.”

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

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

“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I drink to make other people more interesting.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”