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

Hemingway's famous phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (20 April 1926), published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. In the letter, he wrote that he was "not referring to guts but to something else." The phrase was later used by Dorothy Parker in a profile of Hemingway, "The Artist's Reward," in the New Yorker (30 November 1929)

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“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 1

Feeling , Strong , Wine , Sea

“Luis Miguel had the pride of the devil and a feeling of absolute superiority that was justified in many things. He had said so long that he was the best that he really believed it. He had to believe it to go on. It was not just something he believed. It was his belief.”

Ernest Hemingway

Luis Miguel Dominguin was another famous bullfighter and friend of Hemingway's.
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 10

Feeling

“For our dead are a part of the earth of Spain now and the earth of Spain can never die.”

Ernest Hemingway

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

Parting , Dead

“Ay,' he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Feeling

“The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 3, Ch.12
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Death , Fate

“Only three things in my life I've really liked to do - hunt, write and make love.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 2, Ch. 5
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Love , Life , Making love

“Antonio always prayed in the room before the fight at the last when the well-wishers and the followers were gone. If there was time at the ring nearly everyone slipped into the chapel to pray once before the paseo. Antonio knew I prayed for him and never for myself. I was not fighting and I had quit praying for myself during the Spanish Civil War when I saw the terrible things that happened to other people and I felt that to pray for oneself was selfish and egotistical.”

Ernest Hemingway

Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 9

War , People , Time , Fight

“What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

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

Life , Girl , Business , Thinking

“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.”

Ernest Hemingway

Nobel Prize Speech (1954)

Way , Literature , Past , Help

“There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.”

Ernest Hemingway

Preface to The Great Crusade (1940) by Gustav Regler

“Like all truly brave people Antonio is light-hearted and likes to joke and make fun of serious things.”

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is describing his friend, the famous bullfighter Antonio Ordóñez.
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 3

People , Light , Heart

“You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 2, Ch. 5
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Life , Feeling

“If the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written, and reading it over you see that this is so, you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.”

Ernest Hemingway

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Books , Boy , Reading , Night

“In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.”

Ernest Hemingway

"In Another Country" in Men Without Women (1927).

War

“As long as all our dead live in the Spanish earth, and they will live as long as the earth lives, no system of tyranny ever will prevail in Spain.”

Ernest Hemingway

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

Dead

“You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.'
'What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?'
'Write how you are but make it straight.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 10
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Way , Thinking

“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently… Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”

Ernest Hemingway

Paris Review interview (1958)

Change , Reading , Happiness

“When I have an idea, I turn down the flame, as if it were a little alcohol stove, as low as it will go. Then it explodes and that is my idea.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Co. (1974) by James Mellow

Alcohol , Idea

“Well, Fitz, I looked all through that bible, it was in very fine print and stumbling on that great book Ecclesiastics, read it aloud to all who would listen. Soon I was alone and began cursing the bloody bible because there were no titles in it — although I found the source of practically every good title you ever heard of. But the boys, principally Kipling, had been there before me and swiped all the good ones so I called the book Men Without Women hoping it would have a large sale among the fairies and old Vassar Girls.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (15 September 1927); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Women , Men , Books , Hope

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

Part I, Ch. 1
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Life

“I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.”

Ernest Hemingway book For Whom the Bell Tolls

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

Love , Feeling , Thinking , Country

“He always thought of the sea as la mar, which is what people call her in spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fisherman, those who used buoys as floats for their lines or had motorboats bought when the shark lovers had much money, spoke of her as el mar, which is masculine, they spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine, as something that gave or withheld great favors. If she did wild or wicked things, it is because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Love , Money , People , Lovers

“The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. The greater the work of literature, the easier the parody. The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 1, Ch. 4
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Literature

“I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter (21 February 1952); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Health , Intelligence

“Personal columnists … are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat — no matter who killed the meat for him.”

Ernest Hemingway

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

Grass , Learning , Personality

“All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 2, Ch. 7 - Similar to his remark in "A Letter from Cuba" (1934)
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Books

“One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war.”

Ernest Hemingway

Papa Hemingway (1966)

War , Books

“The only thing that could spoil a day was people…. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast (1964), Ch. 5

People , Spring , Happiness

“And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.”

Ernest Hemingway

Letter to his family (18 October 1918); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. It was also published in The Oak Parker (Oak Park, IL) on 16 November 1918. Only 19 years old at the time, Hemingway was recovering from wounds suffered at the front line while serving as a Red Cross volunteer.

Youth , Light , Happiness

“A man must comport himself as a man. He must fight always preferably and soundly with the odds in his favor but on necessity against any sort of odds and with no thought of the outcome. He should follow his tribal laws and customs insofar as he can and accept the tribal discipline when he cannot. But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.”

Ernest Hemingway book True at First Light

Source: True at First Light (1999), Ch. 1

Law , Heart , Fight

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”

Ernest Hemingway

The Toronto Star Weekly (4 March 1922)

Country

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain words which are valid and similies (bring me my dictionary) are like defective ammunition”

Ernest Hemingway

the lowest thing I can think of at this time
Letter (20 March 1953); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker

Thinking , Time , Reading

“War is no longer made by simply analysed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”

Ernest Hemingway

Notes on the Next War (1935)

Men , War , People

“Now Tom was - the hell with that, he said to himself. It is something that happens to everybody. I should know about that by now. It is the only thing that is really final, though.
How do you know that? he asked himself. Going away can be final. Walking out the door can be final. Any form of real betrayal can be final. Dishonesty can be final. Selling out is final. But you are just talking now. Death is what is really final.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 3: At Sea, Section 19
Islands in the Stream (1970)

Death , Hell , Betrayal

“But that story has in it the only constructive thing I ever learned about women - that no matter what happened to them and how they turned, you should try to disregard all that and remember them only as they were on the best day they ever had.”

Ernest Hemingway

On his short story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. Pt. 2, Ch. 9
Papa Hemingway (1966)

Women , Learning

“[W]hen he came out of the anaesthetic the first thing he said was, 'What a man Ernesto would be if he could only write.”

Ernest Hemingway

Luis Miguel Dominguin had undergone surgery after being wounded in a bullfight. From the context it is clear that his remark about Hemingway was a joke.
Source: The Dangerous Summer (1985), Ch. 10