Ernest Hemingway Quotes

475 Sourced Quotes

Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.

Ernest Hemingway
The only place where you could see life and death, i. e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death.

Ernest Hemingway
We thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight.

Ernest Hemingway
It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta.

Ernest Hemingway
The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

Ernest Hemingway
I was so sentimental about you I'd break any one's heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too. It's broken and gone. Everything I believe in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it?

Ernest Hemingway
I don't think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work.

Ernest Hemingway
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.

Ernest Hemingway
You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.

Ernest Hemingway
There is a great inertia about all military operations of any size. But once this inertia has been overcome and underway they are almost as hard to arrest as to initiate.

Ernest Hemingway
To make war all you need is intelligence. But to win you need talent and material.

Ernest Hemingway
She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.

Ernest Hemingway
The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.

Ernest Hemingway
Because Fascism is a lie, it is condemned to literary sterility. And when it is past, it will have no history, except the bloody history of murder.

Ernest Hemingway
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again,... to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.

Ernest Hemingway
Practice any faith you wish. Got a ball field up the island where you can practice. I'll give the Deity a fast one high and inside if he crowds the plate.

Ernest Hemingway
It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.

Ernest Hemingway
Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.

Ernest Hemingway
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run... but thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

Ernest Hemingway
A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well, and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.

Ernest Hemingway
I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

Ernest Hemingway
Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Don't be thinking what you're going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe.

Ernest Hemingway
Let those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole. Then any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly. The thing to do is work and learn to make it.

Ernest Hemingway
If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.

Ernest Hemingway
Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.

Ernest Hemingway