Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.

Ernest Hemingway
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
Drinking wine was not a snobbism nor a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary...

Ernest Hemingway
My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.

Ernest Hemingway
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
And bed, he thought. Bed is my friend. Just bed, he thought. Bed will be a great thing. It is easy when you are beaten, he thought. I never knew how easy it was. And what beat you, the thought.

Ernest Hemingway
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
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
The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.

Ernest Hemingway
'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
The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is something that you know; and not before, and not too damned much after.

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

Ernest Hemingway
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.

Ernest Hemingway
'You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.'
'Yes.'
'It's sort of what we have instead of God.'

Ernest Hemingway
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
Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.

Ernest Hemingway
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
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 (the lowest thing I can think of at this time).

Ernest Hemingway
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in.... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things

Ernest Hemingway
They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead. In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter's two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys. Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two live mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.

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

Ernest Hemingway
However you make your living is where your talent lies.

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

Ernest Hemingway
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
You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful. The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.

Ernest Hemingway
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
'Shit,' said Eddie. 'What the fuck they kill that Davy for?'
'Let's leave it alone, Eddy,' Thomas Hudson said. 'It's way past things we know about.'

Ernest Hemingway
They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.

Ernest Hemingway
I would take anything I love and throw it off the highest cliff you ever saw and not wait to hear it bounce.

Ernest Hemingway