Ernest Hemingway Quotes

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

“I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

“You ought to dream. All our biggest businessmen have been dreamers.”

“Remember everything is right until it's wrong. You'll know when it's wrong.'
'You think so?'
'I'm quite sure. If you don't it doesn't matter. Nothing will matter then.”

“I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.”

“The world was not wheeling anymore. It was just very clear and bright and inclined to blur at the edges.”

“You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you.”

“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.”

“Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.”

“But did thee feel the earth move?”

“Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.”

“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?”

“I don't want to be your friend, baby. I am your friend.”

“There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.”

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”

“Religion is the opium of the poor”

“Now I am depressed myself,' I said. 'That's why I never think about these things. I never think and yet when I begin to talk I say the things I have found out in my mind without thinking.”

“I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.”

“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”

“So this was how you died, in whispers that you did not hear.”

“You roll back to me.”

“This was the price you paid for sleeping together. This was the end of the trap. This was what people got for loving each other.”

“I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one's own body.”

“War is not won by victory.”

“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.”

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

“Never, never tell them. Try and remember that. Never tell anyone anything ever. Never tell anyone anything again.”

“Your blood coagulates beautifully.”

“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.”

“And you treat me wonderfully and keep all your promises.”

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader”

“My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.'
We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.”

“Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.”

“The people that I liked and had not met went to the big cafes because they were lost in them and no one noticed them and they could be alone in them and be together.”

“It's all nonsense. It's only nonsense. I'm not afraid of the rain. I am not afraid of the rain. Oh, oh, God, I wish I wasn't.”

“You'll lose it, if you talk about it”

“The bulls are my best friends."
I translated to Brett.
"You kill your friends?" she asked.
"Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.”

“For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.”

“My father was a deeply sentimental man. And like all sentimental men, he was also very cruel.”

“But in the meantime all the life you have or ever will have is today, tonight, tomorrow, today, tonight, tomorrow, over and over again (I hope),…”

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”

“I felt very lonely when they were all there.”

“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”

“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.”

“Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”

“But you always fall for somebody else and then it's all right. Fall for them but don't let them ruin you.”

“Mice: What is the best early training for a writer?

Y. C.: An unhappy childhood.”

“He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.”

“No; that doesn't interest me.'
'That's because you never read a book about it.”

“One cat just leads to another."

[Letter from Finca Vigia, Cuba, to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson (1943). ]”