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

Uncover Hemingway's timeless wisdom. His iconic quotes explore love, happiness, writing, and self-discovery. Experience the profound complexity and beauty of life through his inspiring words.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an influential American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist known for his economical and understated writing style. His work, which embodied his iceberg theory, had a significant impact on 20th-century fiction. Hemingway lived a daring lifestyle and cultivated a public image that earned him admiration from subsequent generations. He received the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his contributions to the literary world. Over his career, Hemingway published an impressive body of work that includes seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction books. Several more of his works were released posthumously, solidifying his place as one of America's literary greats.

Raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway briefly worked as a reporter for The Kansas City Star after finishing high school. However, he soon decided to enlist as an ambulance driver during World War I and served on the Italian Front. Unfortunately, he sustained severe wounds in 1918 and returned home. These wartime experiences heavily influenced his acclaimed novel A Farewell to Arms. In 1921, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson before moving to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. During this time, he came into contact with the modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community in Paris—an experience that profoundly shaped his writing style. He published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926 and subsequently divorced Richardson before marrying Pauline Pfeiffer. His coverage of the Spanish Civil War fueled his book For Whom the Bell Tolls while also resulting in another divorce with Pfeiffer. Later on, Martha Gellhorn became Hemingway's third wife until they separated when he met Mary Welsh during World War II in London. As a journalist covering significant historical events like the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris alongside Allied troops, Hemingway played an active role in war reportage. He had permanent residences in Key West, Florida throughout the 1930s and in Cuba during the 1940s and 1950s. Hemingway's life took a tragic turn during a trip to Africa in 1954 when he was involved in two plane accidents within consecutive days that left him with lifelong pain and health issues. Ultimately, he died by suicide at his house in Ketchum, Idaho, in mid-1961.

✵ 21. July 1899 – 2. July 1961  •  Other names Ernest Miller Hemingway, Ernst Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway photo
Ernest Hemingway: 501 quotes92 likes

Ernest Hemingway Quotes

“We have fought this war and won it. Now let us not be sanctimonious; nor hypocritical; nor vengeful; nor stupid. Let us make our enemies incapable of ever making war again, let us re-educate them, let us learn to live in peace and justice with all countries and all peoples in this world. To do this we must educate and re-educate. But first we must educate ourselves.”

Ernest Hemingway

Introduction to Treasury of the Free World (1946)

“It’s his sense of self-preservation.’ ‘The great Italian sense.’ ‘The greatest Italian sense.”

Ernest Hemingway book Che Ti Dice La Patria?

"Che ti dice la Patria?" in Men Without Women (1927)

“I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

Source: A Farewell to Arms (1929), Ch. 15

“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Farewell to Arms

One of the alternative endings to the novel, published in A Farewell to Arms The Special Edition.
A Farewell to Arms (1929)

“To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic.”

Ernest Hemingway

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

“All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices. Not a one will wish you luck or hope that you will keep on writing unless you have political affiliations in which case these will rally around and speak of you and Homer, Balzac, Zola and Link Steffens.”

Ernest Hemingway

A Letter from Cuba (1934)

“The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.”

Ernest Hemingway book Death in the Afternoon

Source: Death in the Afternoon (1932), Ch. 10

“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.”

Ernest Hemingway book Islands in the Stream

Pt. 1: Bimini, Section 8
Islands in the Stream (1970)

“Red Dog smiled. 'I would like you to meet my friends Mr Sitting Bull, Mr Poisoned Buffalo, and Chief Running Skunk-Backwards.'
'Sitting Bull's a name I know,' Yogi remarked, shaking hands.
'Oh, I'm not one of those Sitting Bulls,' Mr Sitting Bull said.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Torrents of Spring

Part 3, Ch. 2
The Torrents of Spring (1926)

“Any man can face death but to be committed to bring it as close as possible while performing certain classic movements and do this again and again and again and then deal it out yourself with a sword to an animal weighing half a ton which you love is more complicated than just facing death. It is facing your performance as a creative artist each day and your necessity to function as a skillful killer. Antonio had to kill quickly and mercifully and still give the bull one full chance at him when he crossed over the horn at least twice a day.
Everyone in bullfighting helps everyone else in bullfighting in the ring. In spite of all rivalries and hatreds it is the closest brotherhood there is. Only bullfighters know the risks they run and what the bull can do with his horns to their bodies and their minds.”

Ernest Hemingway

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

“Courage is grace under pressure.”

Ernest Hemingway

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)

http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2017/07/hemingways-grace-under-pressure.html

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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).

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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

“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.

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“[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

“The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.”

Ernest Hemingway

Pt. 2, Ch. 6
Papa Hemingway (1966)

“[T]he rain was making the finest sound that we, who live much outside of houses, ever hear.”

Ernest Hemingway book Green Hills of Africa

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

“If you have a success, you have it for the wrong reasons. If you become popular it is always because of the worst aspects of your work.”

Ernest Hemingway

As quoted in That Summer in Paris (1963) by Morley Callaghan