Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

'But man is not made for defeat,' he said. 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.'

Ernest Hemingway
Never fall in love?" "Always," said the count. "I am always in love.

Ernest Hemingway
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
You love a lot of things if you live around them, but there isn't any woman and there isn't any horse, nor any before nor any after, that is as lovely as a great airplane.

Ernest Hemingway
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.

Ernest Hemingway
'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
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
Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Ernest Hemingway
But don't try to find an untroublesome woman. She will dull out on you. What makes a woman good in bed makes it impossible for her to live alone.

Ernest Hemingway
He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

Ernest Hemingway
I'm not advocating the strenuous life for everyone or trying to say it's the choice form of life. Anyone who's had the luck or misfortune to be an athlete has to keep his body in shape. The body and mind are closely coordinated. Fattening of the body can lead to fattening of the mind. I would be tempted to say that it can lead to fattening of the soul, but I don't know anything about the soul.

Ernest Hemingway
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
They can't yank novelist like they can pitcher. Novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

Ernest Hemingway
There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.

Ernest Hemingway
In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect wood-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

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

Ernest Hemingway
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
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
He rested sitting on the un-stepped mast and sail and tried not to think but only to endure.

Ernest Hemingway
The rich were dull and they drank too much.... 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 most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.

Ernest Hemingway
'Why, you sad son-of-a-bitch, how can you be so cocky and stand there and block cars when you're nothing but a miserable bear and a black bear at that - not even a polar or a grizzly or anything worth while.'

Ernest Hemingway
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

Ernest Hemingway
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
You're not a moron. You're only a case of arrested development.

Ernest Hemingway
Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

Ernest Hemingway
Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
I don't know, the boy said. All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

Ernest Hemingway
He could beat anything, he thought, because no thing could hurt him if he did not care.

Ernest Hemingway
I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word.

Ernest Hemingway
A continent ages quickly once we come. The natives live in harmony with it. But the foreigner destroys, cuts down the trees, drains the water, so that the water supply is altered, and in a short time the soil, once the sod is turned under, is cropped out and, next, it starts to blow away as it has blown away in every old country and as I had seen it start to blow in Canada. The earth gets tired of being exploited.

Ernest Hemingway