Ernest Hemingway Quotes: 501 Quotes for Timeless Wisdom on Love, Happiness, and Writing

Catherine and David Bourne in Ch. 1
Source: The Garden of Eden (1986)
Context: But I get so hungry,' she said. 'Is it normal do you think? Do you always get so hungry when you make love?'
'When you love somebody.

Love , Making love

“I wanted to try this new drink: That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Complete Short Stories

Drink

“Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
Come let us fart in the home.
There is no art in a fart.
Still a fart may not be artless.
Let us fart and artless fart in the home.”

Ernest Hemingway book 88 Poems

Source: 88 Poems

Art , Home , Heart

“If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.”

Ernest Hemingway

Training

“That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

Love , Girl

“Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms

War

“Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”

Ernest Hemingway

“You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Sun Also Rises

Source: The Sun Also Rises

“Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Time , Past

“Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

“I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.

'It's a bore,' he said out loud.

'What is, my dear?'

'Anything you do too bloody long.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Complete Short Stories

“Be patient, hand," he said. "I do this for you.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

“I am so in love with you that there isn’t anything else.”

Ernest Hemingway

Love

“I've been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1547504/Hemingway-and-Dietrich-letters.html?service=print Marlene Dietrich (1 July 1930)

Love , Women

“For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ch. 13

Time

“You never understand anybody that loves you.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 21 (the last sentence of the novel)
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Love , Understanding

“It would be easy for us, if we do not learn to understand the world and appreciate the rights, privileges and duties of al other countries and peoples, to represent in our power the same danger to the world that Facism did.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)

People , World , Understanding , Learning

“Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.”

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)

Failure , Understanding , Fight

“No weapon has ever settled a moral problem. It can impose a solution but it cannot guarantee it to be a just one. You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)

Problem

“That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

“Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich (11 April 1935); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“You're beautiful, like a May fly.”

Ernest Hemingway

Statement to his future wife Mary Welsh, recalled in her obituaries (26 November 1986)

Beauty , Flying

“I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man…. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 12

Thinking

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 7

Understanding

“That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Mood

“I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.”

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)

“Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 17
Islands in the Stream (1970)

“If every one said orders were impossible to carry out when they were received where would you be? Where would we all be if you just said, "Impossible," when orders came?”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

“You did not do so badly for something that is worthless. But there was a time when I could not find you.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Time

“The rich were dull and they drank too much or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Julian and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, "The very rich are different from you and me." And how someone had said to Julian, "Yes, they have more money."”

Ernest Hemingway

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Originally in Esquire "Julian" was named as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, in "The Rich Boy" (1926) had written: "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand..." Fitzgerald responded to this in a letter (August 1936) to Hemingway saying: "Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction."

Money

“As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1954)

Beauty , Happiness

“They say that if you can stay away from bullfighting for a year you can stay away from it forever. That is not true but it has some truth in it and, except for fights in Mexico, I had been away for fourteen years. A lot of that time though was like being in jail except that I was locked out; not locked in.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 1

Truth , Time , Fight

“However you make your living is where your talent lies.”

Ernest Hemingway

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," first published in Esquire (August 1936); later published in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)