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

About his book, The Sun Also Rises in a letter (21 August 1926); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Books , Hope

“Get it straight. Your boy you lose. Love you lose. Honor has been gone for a long time. Duty you do.
Sure and what's your duty? What I said I'd do. And all the other things you said you'd do?”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 2: Cuba (a few paragraphs from the end). The 'boy' is Thomas Hudson's last surviving son, Tom, a fighter pilot who was killed in action.
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Love , Boy , Time

“All our words from loose using have lost their edge.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

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

“Anglers have a way of romanticizing their battles with fish and of forgetting that the fish has a hook in his mouth, his gullet, or his belly and that his gameness is really an extreme of panic in which he runs, leaps, and pulls to get away until he dies. It would seem to be enough advantage to the angler that the fish has the hook in his mouth rather than the angler.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to S. Kip Farrington Jr., Atlantic Game Fishing (1937)

Way , Game , Fish , Forgetting

“Keep your head clear and know how to suffer like a man. Or a fish, he thought.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Fish , Suffering

“I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (1 July 1925); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Death , Secret , Family , Beauty

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (3 July 1956); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

“You make your own luck, Gig. You know what makes a good loser? Practice.”

Ernest Hemingway

Speaking to his son Gregory, as quoted in Papa, a Personal Memoir (1976) Gregory H. Hemingway

“Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai "Ngàje Ngài," the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”

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)

God , Mountain , Housing

“The faces that were young once were old as mine but everyone remembered how we were. The eyes had not changed and nobody was fat. No mouths were bitter no matter what the eyes had seen. Bitter lines around the mouth are the first sign of defeat. Nobody was defeated.”

Ernest Hemingway

It is July 1959 and Hemingway is in Marceliano's bar in Pamplona, where he has not been since before the Spanish Civil War. In the following paragraph Hemingway mentions for contrast an unpleasant American journalist in his early twenties whose 'handsome young face already showed the traced lines of bitterness around the upper lips.'
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9

Change

“But are there not many Fascists in your country?'
'There are many who do not know they are Fascists, but will find it out when the time comes'.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Ch. 16

Time , Country

“The best sky was in Italy and Spain and northern Michigan in the fall and in the fall in the Gulf off Cuba.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part II, Ch. 2
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

“All a man has is pride. Sometimes you have it so much it is a sin. We have all done things for pride that we knew were impossible. We didn't care. But a man must implement his pride with intelligence and care.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 6
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Intelligence

“Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 1, Ch. 3
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Age

“Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a big pump-factory in Michigan. Spring would soon be here. Could it be that what this writing fellow Hutchinson had said, 'If winter comes, can spring be far behind?' would be true again this year? Yogi Johnson wondered.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 1, Ch. 1 (the opening lines of the novel)
The line Yogi Johnson quotes is actually from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. This is one of several misattributed quotes in the novel.
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Spring , Winter

“Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to Bernard Berenson (2 October 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Love , Books , Making love , Light

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”

Ernest Hemingway

Preface to The First Forty-Nine Stories (1944)

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows, and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things only because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Hemingway's famous iceberg theory of writing.
Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 16

Feeling , Water

“I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.”

Ernest Hemingway book True at First Light

Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 17

Love , Men , Stupidity , Fear

“Well, I know what I have to do, so it is simple. Duty is a wonderful thing. I do not know what I should have done without duty since young Tom died. You could have painted, he told himself. Or you could have done something useful. Maybe, he thought. Duty is simpler.
This is useful, he thought. Do not think against it. It helps to get it over with. That's all we are working for. Christ knows what there is beyond that.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 15
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Thinking , Help , Christ , Painting

“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.”

Ernest Hemingway book True at First Light

Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 9

World

“You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.”

Ernest Hemingway

Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Books , Beer

“Madame, it is an old word and each one takes it new and wears it out himself. It is a word that fills with meaning as a bladder with air and the meaning goes out of it as quickly. It may be punctured as a bladder is punctured and patched and blown up again and if you have not had it it does not exist for you. All people talk of it, but those who have had it are marked by it, and I would not wish to speak of it further since of all things it is the most ridiculous to talk of and only fools go through it many times.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 11

People , Fools , Time

“Tell me some true things about fighting.'
'Tell me you love me.'
'I love you,' the girl said. 'You can publish it in the Gazzettino if you like. I love your hard, flat body and your strange eyes that frighten me when they become wicked. I love your hand and all your other wounded places.”

Ernest Hemingway book Across the River and into the Trees

Renata and Colonel Richard Cantwell in Ch. 12
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

Love , Girl , Fight

“Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 4
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Evil

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway

"Trout Fishing in Europe" The Toronto Star Weekly (17 November 1923)

Girl , Fish

“Darling, would you like to grow a beard?'
'Would you like me to?'
'It might be fun. I'd like to see you with a beard.'
'All right. I'll grow one. I'll start now this minute. It's a good idea. It will give me something to do.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Catherine and Henry discussing whether he should grow a beard, in Ch. 38
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

Idea

“Easy writing makes hard reading.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in Paris Was Our Mistress (1947) by Samuel Putnam, p. 128

Reading

“We in America should see that no man is ever given, no matter how gradually or how noble and excellent the man, the power to put this country into a war which is now being prepared and brought closer each day with all the pre-meditation of a long planned murder. For when you give power to an executive you do not know who will be filling that position when the time of crisis comes.”

Ernest Hemingway

Notes on the Next War (1935)

War , Time , Country

“Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.”

Ernest Hemingway

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Books , Dreams , Hope , Boy

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway book Fathers and Sons

Nick Adams of "Fathers and Sons" in Winner Take Nothing (1932)

Way , Bird , Flying

“Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.”

Ernest Hemingway book True at First Light

Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 12

Way , Feeling

“The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever…Those who have entered it honorably, and no man ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.”

Ernest Hemingway

"On the American Dead in Spain", New Masses (February 14, 1939)

Parting , Dead

“It is very hard to write this way, beginning things backward, and the author hopes the reader will realize this and not grudge this little word of explanation. I know I would be very glad to read anything the reader ever wrote, and I hope the reader will make the same sort of allowances. If any of the readers would care to send me anything they ever wrote, for criticism or advice, I am always at the Café du Dôme any afternoon, talking about Art with Harold Stearns and Sinclair Lewis, and the reader can bring his stuff along with him, or he can send it to me care of my bank, if I have a bank.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 2, Ch. 5
Harold Stearns was a once-well-known New York writer and intellectual whom Hemingway knew when they were both living in Paris.
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

Hope , Art , Way , Reading

“Scott took LITERATURE so solemnly. He never understood that it was just writing as well as you can and finishing what you start.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to Arthur Mizener (12 May 1950); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Literature

“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.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 9

Death , Art

“I didn't marry her family.'
'Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Garden of Eden

David and Colonel John Boyle in Ch. 7
The Garden of Eden (1986)